One can always count on hearing many surprisingly young but highly talented musicians at the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts’ summer concert series, but even in this company Sunny Lin Kai Zhang, a 20-year-old undergraduate at The Juilliard School, is notable for his technical achievements as well as the awards he has won in at least ten competitions. Zhang’s recital on Thursday night at Williams Hall, New England Conservatory, featured an unusual mix of composers and pieces, juxtaposing radically different musical styles, with the majority making extraordinary technical demands. While he assuredly feels a personal affinity for these works, he occasionally demonstrates a less than full understanding of a composer’s unique qualities; but of his formidable command of piano technique and desire to communicate with his listeners he left no doubt.

Zhang engaged his audience at the outset with Alexander Scriabin’s early Piano Sonata No. 2 in G sharp Minor, Op. 19, the “Sonata-Fantasy”. The pianist made us hear the influence of Chopin, Liszt, and the composer’s older Russian compatriots but also Scriabin’s own harmonic traits as heard in the Op. 8 études. In the work’s two movements (Andante and Presto), the composer seems both to embrace the 19^th century and look in new directions: Zhang’s highly communicative playing fit this aesthetic crossroads ideally, e.g., extending the rubato of Chopin and Liszt à la Rachmaninoff and gently highlighting melodic inner voices amid Romantic effusions.

Frédéric Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat Major, Op. 61, can be considered one of his visionary late works. The performer’s tempos may have been faster than most but did not hinder him from offering a personal account of the work, smoothly alternating the elements of contemplation (one could hear echoes of Chopin’s Fantaisie, Op. 49) and the emphatic, virile rhythms characteristic of the polonaise. Special moments included the noble, warm-toned “chorale” at the center of the work and the passage of proliferating trills starting in one voice and gradually adding several more, trilling together. The Polonaise-Fantaisie features numerous unexpected harmonic shifts, and Zhang’s responsiveness to them by shifting colors enhanced his musical narrative.

We then made a large jump in time to the 20^th century with Claude Debussy’s Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells through the Leaves) and Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the Moon Descends over the Temple that Was), from his second series of Images. In the first piece the artist used the damper pedal to create a mysterious recurring wash of whole-tone scale sonorities—where he also admirably achieved Debussy’s desired “no hammers” effect—but allowed greater clarity in the sections of more varied harmony. He entranced this listener by creating an atmosphere of disembodied bells, more dreamlike than Ravel’s equally evocative La vallée des cloches. Though Debussy disliked the application of the term “impressionism” to his music, in Zhang’s hands this piece did seem to be a beautiful musical counterpart to, e.g., a painting by Claude Monet. Its final chord, however, barely had time to die away, however, when the performer commenced the next piece—initially making it seem like a new section of the first piece. Influenced by Javanese gamelan music and utilizing more sharply defined harmonies than its predecessor (for example, the many organum-like chords moving in parallel), Et la lune was somewhat more less mysterious and more sensuous than Cloches, and gradually one became aware that Zhang’s pedaling was subtly drier. This permitted full-fledged melodies to come to the fore unlike the embedding of melodic fragments in the texture of the preceding piece. He wove a different kind of spell expertly in illustrating the austere beauty of an Oriental temple in moonlight.

Again allowing his listeners no more than several seconds to savor Debussy’s bewitching picture in sound, the performer dove into Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109. Such a close juxtaposition of two utterly different aesthetics was inevitably jarring. While the 20^th-century French work offered the composer’s conception of a specific place, Beethoven’s work, almost a century older, stood at the cusp of the Romantic era while still incorporating traits of the Classical and even Baroque periods. In the opening Vivace Zhang emphasized its Romantic qualities with his generous rubato (emphasizing some arresting harmonic progressions), very large dynamic range, and much pedal. The turbulent Prestissimo, more blunt-spoken and far less Romantic than the first movement, would have benefited from a leaner sound with more sparing pedaling, but Zhang’s fingerwork remained very impressive at an uncompromising tempo. The concluding theme and variations pose the greatest interpretive and technical challenges in the sonata, and here the artist triumphed. He brought a warm, autumnal glow to the theme that (aside from several slight accents not in the score) well fulfilled the composer’s specification: Gesangvoll mit innigster Empfindung (songful with the most introspective expression). In the course of the variations Beethoven again looks back to earlier musical styles as well as forward to the Romantic. The first presaged the nocturnes of John Field and Chopin with elegant rubato and varied articulation; the second alternated a musical pointillism of detached 16^th notes with legato chords: Zhang convincingly knit the two elements together; the fourth, constructed around a dactyl-rhythm motive, he rendered as a brilliant polyphonic étude; in the fifth he dazzled with accelerating trills (somewhat akin to the “proliferating trills” of the Polonaise-Fantaisie heard earlier); these culminated in the climax wherein he met the cruel technical challenge of parallel inner-voice trills (played largely with thumbs and index fingers) while limning melodic notes in the outer voices with the remaining fingers. After this fevered passage Zhang supplied balm with his return to the beautiful simplicity of the original theme.

Having begun the program with Scriabin, the pianist closed with Scriabin’s classmate and friend, Sergei Rachmaninoff. The latter’s Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor, Op. 36, is not frequently heard in recital, and many musicians consider the work a “problem child”. Rachmaninoff composed the original version in 1913 but, not satisfied with it, revised it in 1931 (Vladimir Horowitz made his own version, with the composer’s blessing, circa 1940). Our performer elected to play the 1931 version and made a strong case for it. The Allegro agitato opened with a lightning bolt, the outer sections full of stormy effects: thundering chords, pelting raindrops, buffeting winds. The gentle middle section provided a moment of calm. Late in the movement a spectacular sequence of descending fortissimo chords seemed to promise an overwhelming conclusion, but Rachmaninoff opted instead for an attenuated ending which Zhang made redolent of regret. In the Non allegro – Lento second movement the pianist made the melody sing over the accompanying voices, but lacking the composer’s trademark sumptuous tunes, the movement’s main interest arguably is the heated central climax which Zhang charged with electricity. He followed this with caressing tone in the Lento section. What seemed to be a coda (still Lento) turned out to be a bridge into the final Allegro molto. Here too Rachmaninoff’s usual gift for gorgeous melody seemed to desert him so perhaps he compensated with stupendous technical display;  Zhang decisively surmounted the most taxing demands on his stamina of the whole program, playing very much in the grand manner and creating an enormous sound but never letting his tone turn harsh. The frenzied martellato chords at the end brought down the house. While the piece may not be as memorable as the composer’s best, Sunny Lin Kai Zhang’s breathtaking performance of it will certainly endure in my memory.