No easy task playing a recital of Ravel’s complete solo piano works … the repertory includes some of the instrument’s most notoriously difficult standard repertory (e.g., Gaspard de la nuit’s “Scarbo,” “Miroir’s “Alborada del Gracioso” and Le tombeau de Couperin’s “Toccata”). While he filled his solo piano works with glittering explosions of virtuosity, most also possess deceptively emotional depth in which the unsuspecting pianist may drown. And playing all his piano music on a single program (even one with three intermissions) demands near-incredible stamina: the pianist is on stage for three hours.

Only a remarkable pianist like Seong-Jin Cho, who appeared in the Celebrity Series Sunday afternoon in Symphony Hall, can meet Ravel’s complicated and extensive demands. Cho’s already among the greatest talents of his remarkable era. Although he’s still young, piano mavens have known about him for years. In 2011 the then 17-year-old pianist won the Bronze Medal in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition and, in 2015, he won the Gold Medal in Warsaw’s Chopin Competition. He’s already appeared several times in the Celebrity Series and as a soloist with the BSO)

Cho opened with Serenade grotesque and Menuet antique, realizing their Mussorgsky-like grotesquerie and harmonic surprises with complete mastery. His delivered an almost startling well-executed and idiomatic take on Ravel’s Pavanne pour une infante defunte. He stripped the piece of sugary sentimentality that many pianists emphasize, thus revealing a melodic line with unsuspected strength. In the Jeux d’eau, Cho demonstrated that in this work, which is inspired by the textures of Liszt’s Jeux d’eaux a La Villa d’Este, Ravel may have surpassed the master himself.

After the first interval, Cho gave extraordinary traversals of two of the composer’s greatest works, Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit. In Miroirs, the listener encountered, as if for the first time, the nevulous mists that “Noctuelles” depicts and of the echoes of birdsong in “Oiseaux triste” (and of its resemblance to Liszt’s St. Francis Preaching to the Birds). Cho’s navigation of the legendary \difficulties of Alborada del Graciosa astonished me. In conjuring up the sounds and rhythms of flamenco guitar music, Ravel raises a repeated note technique, whose use dates back to Scarlatti, to a new level of difficulty. Cho dispensed these problems with a ridiculous ease as exhilarating to watch as to hear.

In Gaspard de la nuit, perhaps wanting to top Mily Balakirev’s Islamey, the composer set out to make the piece ― particularly its third and final section, “Scarbo” ― the most pianistically difficult ever written. Cho’s glorious interpretation ranks among the best this listener has heard in the decades since he heard Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli perform it in New York City. Cho made the waves of arpeggios in the melancholy song of “Ondine” sound unusually luscious and seductive. In “Le Gibet,” the hanging and decomposing corpses came to cruel life and “Scarbo,” with its macabre terrors and frightening silences, proved just as unforgettable. Cho also did something that I don’t think I’ve heard before. He sustained the final, tolling B-flat which chimes throughout “Le Gibet,” just long enough to make “Scarbo’s” terrifying goblin seem to rise from the hanging corpses. In its sheer excitement and extravagance, Cho’s “Scarbo” recalled Francois Samson’s famous 1948 recording of the piece.

The afternoon’s final third concluded with Le tombeau de Couperin. While his two piano concertos were yet to come, this was the last work Ravel ever composed for solo piano. He had driven an ambulance on the Western Front in World War I and saw its horrors up close, and dedicated each of Le tombeau’s six movements to a friend who died. Yet melancholy hardly obtains. In a biographical sketch, Ravel remarked of its relative brightness that “the dead are sad enough.”

Cho elicited the dead with grace and elegance. He rendered the second movement’s “Fugue” with a special  delicacy. “Rigaudon” came across with poignance rather than sentimentality. In “Toccata,” perhaps “the finest moto perpetuo ever written for solo piano, he executed the repeated notes and alternating chords with staggering splendor.

After experiencing three hours of flawless and heroic pianism, we expected and received no encores.

Stephen Wigler has a peculiarly geekish interest in the piano and in pianists. He has served over the years as a staff music critic in Orlando and Baltimore.