Pianist Jorge Federico Osorio, tenderly applying the last touches to Albeniz's “Granada,” its combination of guitars and starry night, brought an enthusiastic crowd to its collective, ecstatic feet at the inaugural concert at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, the evening of September 8. Sponsored by the Steinway Society the Bay Area and the Castellano Family Foundation, Mr. Osorio's fine recital ushered in a new venue for Latino multicultural enrichment, especially given the warm acoustic of the hall and the lightweight but brilliant sound of the house Steinway. Osorio's concert featured the music of Ponce, Granados, and Chopin, wherein the broad culture of Ponce impressed us with the variety and bravura of his musical imagination.

Osorio opened with Ponce's Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, a sweetly melancholy piece that soon took a modal turn and then burst into a toccata, a duet for the hands with fanfares, all in the manner of Busoni. A Granados group of Spanish Dances followed, Minueto, Andaluza, and Oriental. Each of these received sensuously decorative treatment, rife with Andalusian rhythms, plastic harmonies and colors, and finely tuned rubato. Osorio's trill became an elastic, often sinuous thread weaving through ways and byways of the Iberian spirit. Again, the Steinway yielded up bright and variegated colors, with none of the percussive or ostentatious overtones that some varieties of the instrument produce.

The liquid fire found a true, kindred vehicle in Chopin's B Minor Sonata, Op. 58. Osorio did not linger or affect any false gravity in this piece; he approached it directly and aggressively, but without intrusive percussion. The preliminaries established, Osorio imposed a firm hand on both bravura filigree and Chopin's high-borne arias, instrumental applications of Bellini's bel canto. Drama and ornamentation balanced fluidly, and then we were in the throes of the all-too-brief Scherzo, mercurial and kaleidoscopic. The highlight certainly came in the hypnotic Largo, a jeweled nocturne of uncannily persuasive power. The last movement easily dispelled any notion of an effeminate Chopin, all sinew and cyclonic tumult, Romantic agony and lusty, virile cadences.

The second half of the concert featured only the salon piano works of Ponce, most conceived during his Paris sojourn of the 1920s and 1930s, under the spell of Maurice Ravel and perhaps Albert Roussel. Arrulladora played as an extended cantilena, a mellow example of canto jondo, deep song. Rapsodia Cubana, on the other hand, clearly evoked the spirit of Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody, big and gaudy in gesture and fioritura, touched by a reminiscence or two of Gottschalk. The Three Mazurcas paid homage to Chopin, certainly; but they no less invited sensibilities and ecstasies from Scriabin. The second of the set might owe a debt to Grieg. The Two Etudes exploited the crossing of the hands, and the second of these could have been penned by Leopold Godowsky. The finale, the Balada Mexicana, combined etude, bravura showpiece, and recitativo-nocturne in a colorful amalgam of episodes, featuring huge trills, double octaves, sweeping gestures, and the big flourish that quite swept the audience up in unbridled applause for a program, an artist, and a recital hall of enduring appeal.