For Bostonians who choose to remain in the city, August annually brings the reward of the summer concert series presented by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts. On Friday evening its second recital featured Hsiang Tu performing an all-Maurice Ravel concert at Williams Hall, New England Conservatory. Any such program will inevitably be greatly challenging to any pianist, but Tu’s was especially fearsome on paper, encompassing the complete Miroirs, Gaspard de la nuit, and Le tombeau de Couperin, as well as the solo piano transcription of La valse. He displayed not only the sovereign technical control all of these works require but, equally important, his sensitivity to Ravel’s style and ability to paint pictures in music.

Arranging his selections in chronological order, Tu opened with the first set of Ravel’s mature works, Miroirs (Mirrors), five pieces completed in 1905. His playing of Noctuelles skillfully depicted night moths, the texture thickening as if the insects suddenly swarmed together around a light and then just as suddenly dissipating as the artist partially or wholly released the sustaining pedal. In the middle section we heard the first example of many of a much-repeated pitch as the center of changing harmonies. Tu made the sustained chords over deep bass tones an effective dark foil to the delicate fluttering of moth wings in the outer sections. He conjured a contrasting atmosphere in Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds). Opening with distant birdcalls, the performer then added the torpor of oppressive heat with subdued, dark harmonies murmuring in the lower registers as the birdsong continued above. When something agitated the birds, Tu conveyed the beating of wings with a sudden flurry of broken chords before the heavy atmosphere of the opening inevitably returned. The pianist’s impressive control of touch allowed us to relish subtle nuances within a relatively restricted dynamic range throughout. Like his older contemporary, Claude Debussy, Ravel had an attraction to and great skill at illustrating water in various forms. Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean) naturally employs a much greater dynamic spectrum than the previous pieces. Tu’s fine ear and command of touch again paid dividends, portraying a small boat ascending to the crests of large waves and descending to troughs. Even when quiet, the incessant arpeggios of the left hand made us feel the ocean’s mighty power, eventually building to great climaxes. Alborada del gracioso (Morning Song of the Jester) is an example of another passion of both Ravel and Debussy: Spanish culture. The pianist tossed off the most technically demanding work of the set with ease, with fiendishly rapid repeated notes, occasional strummed chords, and light glissandos evoking flamenco guitar. Perhaps it lacked only crisp, clear execution of the many ornamental triplets that usually convey the effect of castanets. Nonetheless, Tu’s performance impressed for its virtuosity, varieties of color, and joie de vivre. Miroirs concluded serenely with La vallée des cloches (The Valley of Bells), a lush “three-dimensional” landscape with multiple sets of bells, some higher, some lower, some closer, some farther. Tu expertly differentiated among these qualities, bringing the more melodic bells subtly to the fore while letting the accompanying ones be heard, albeit less prominently. The hushed concluding chords held the audience spellbound.

Arguably Ravel’s most famous (pianists might say infamous) piano work is Gaspard de la nuit from 1908 (the title is a nickname for the devil), three “pieces of transcendental technique,” inspired by poems of Aloysius Bertrand. Ondine concerns a water nymph of that name, giving the composer another opportunity to display his formidable skill at depicting water’s volatile moods. As diabolically difficult as the opening 32^nd-note triple-piano chords are, Tu let us hear only their iridescent shimmer before the quiet entrance of Ondine’s voice, one of Ravel’s most ravishing melodies. As before, the artist’s sensitive touch and sovereign technique proved indispensable in his depiction of the nymph: delicately seductive initially, rising to a passionate central climax, and finally, after her efforts at seduction have proved unsuccessful, giving way to great gusts of laughter before slipping below the water, leaving only ripples behind. Le gibet (The Gibbet) paints a bleak scene of a dead man hanging from a gallows in the reddening light of sunset. Ravel employs the repeated pitches device here too but more relentlessly than elsewhere: these B-flat octaves, alternating with single B flats, remain unaltered from start to finish, the first and last sounds we hear. The pianist mesmerized us with them even as surrounding harmonies changed, dynamics rose and fell, textures condensed and thinned. The concluding Scarbo is infamous among pianists as Ravel intended to outdo what was then widely held to be the single most difficult work in the piano literature, Mily Balakirev’s Islamey, as well as to make a caricature of romanticism. Bertrand’s poem describes how the demented but puny goblin Scarbo startles him at night by cackling, scratching on his bed’s curtains, pirouetting across the bedroom floor, growing seemingly as tall as a Gothic cathedral, before turning translucent blue and vanishing like an extinguished candle. The performer skillfully guided us through this pianistic and poetic chamber of horrors, depicting the goblin’s scratching, laughing, and dancing with more fiendishly fast repeated notes, tortuous passagework, and marvelously rapid leapfrogging of hands. He stunned us in the two great climaxes with thundering octaves and towering chords. Throughout Gaspard Tu made me often push Ravel’s mind-boggling technical demands to the back of my mind to focus instead on the musical narration of the oneiric poems of Bertrand, a very notable achievement.

Composed entirely during the years of World War I, Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin not only paid tribute to the great harpsichord composer François Couperin and the keyboard dance suites of the French Baroque clavecinistes generally, but also, through personal dedications, to artists who were Ravel’s friends who died in the war. Ravel’s music had evolved from the impressionism and caricatured romanticism heard earlier to early neoclassicism, helped no doubt by the influence of Couperin’s music and that of his colleagues. Tu, accordingly, often created drier textures, using the pedal more sparingly, perhaps akin to an artist who forgoes watercolors for etching. He imbued the Prélude, based on whirling triplets, with a gentle rhythmic lilt, handsome differentiation of colors, and elegant phrase-shaping. He handled the Fugue, often considered the “problem child” of the suite, with simple and direct communication, subtly indicating entrances of the subject and its inversion with consistent articulation, avoiding “interpreting” the music, an early example of Ravel’s style dépouillé—stripped-down style. The hushed, stark ending (a bare octave with fifth) moved me as a memorial to the composer’s musical predecessors as well as his deceased friend. After the quasi-Baroque sound of the fugue, the Forlane returned us to more typically Ravellian harmonies, though within the context of a moderate-tempo dance with constant dotted rhythms; so it did not surprise that Tu reverted temporarily to the earlier watercolor style of pedaling, though it did cost the dotted rhythms some crispness and clarity. However, he also added some tasteful rubato that enjoyably added to the music’s quirky character. Rigaudon is the most fun piece in the suite, in my opinion, and in the performer’s hands its blustering ebullience made a delightful contrast to the other movements. Nonetheless, it did have its own internal contrast: a slower, sweetly contemplative middle section. The charming, understated Menuet should have provided another early example of style dépouillé. However, Tu’s “voicings”, rubato, and varied pedaling made it seem over-sophisticated. It engaged the listener but perhaps did not fully align with Ravel’s intentions. In the concluding Toccata, a moto perpetuo display piece with (let’s face it) the most tenuous connection to the French Baroque of all the movements, the pianist again generously delivered pyrotechnics. Returning to the neoclassic-style pedaling of the prelude, he executed with ideal crispness the quiet rapid-fire 16^th notes, with many repeated pitches, that form most of the piece while affectingly shaping the legato melody that appears at times in contrast. At the great climax he maintained clarity with minimal pedaling amid the fast and furious flying notes; though Tu’s playing was not utterly immaculate here, his stupendous technique kept it nearly so while his transparent texture was nothing if not honest service to the music.

World War I also cast its baleful influence on the closer, La valse (1920), transcribed for solo piano from the orchestral tone poem. While seeming to begin as a tribute to Johann Strauss (“The Waltz King”) and the refined manners of Viennese high society, it ultimately degenerates into an apocalyptic vision as those manners come crashing down spectacularly. At the outset Tu set up a quiet, rhythmic throbbing in the deep bass that finally yielded to the entrance of the first full theme, swooning with rubato that caught just the right piss-elegant effect, even suggesting string portamentos with heavy pedal. In a later theme the rise-and-fall within every phrase, which would be over-expressive in most contexts, also contributed to the air of exaggerated gentility, as did the frequent über-liberal rubato. Appropriately, the artist’s playing made maximum use of orchestral effects, subtly distinguishing strings, woodwinds, and brass, using the pedal imaginatively to “disperse the clouds” and let us see the waltzing couples (in Ravel’s own description), and giving us fittingly melodramatic glissandos up and down to add impact to more than one climax. In the coda the near-unbearable tension set up by Tu’s acceleration and crescendo over an obsessively repeating phrase could only be relieved by the concluding pounding octaves that abandoned waltz rhythm and decisively trampled all gentility. Again, Tu triumphed by rendering even extraordinary technical demands slightly less fascinating than the musical narrative.

At the end of a demanding evening, the audience insisted on an encore. The artist complied with the second movement (Mouvement de menuet) of Ravel’s Sonatine (1905) with unaffected simplicity and charm, giving us a balm after the excesses of La valse. I congratulate Hsiang Tu on his brilliant realization of as ambitious a piano program as I can remember.

Geoffrey Wieting holds Bachelor’s degrees in organ and Latin from Oberlin College and a Master’s degree in collaborative piano from New England Conservatory. He is Organist of First Parish Church of Weston as well as a freelance organist, collaborative pianist and vocal coach. He sings with the Back Bay Chorale and serves on the Board of Directors of the Old West Organ Society.