Having added a rousing encore, Liszt’s Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody in D-flat, to an already magnanimous, marathon program, former Van Cliburn Silver Medalist Joyce Yang brought an enthusiastic audience to its collective, stamping feet at Le Petit Trianon Theatre, San Jose, Sunday September 23. Sponsored by the Steinway Society the Bay Area, the recital bore the mantle of former days in keyboard history, when pianists seemed deliberately to accentuate prowess and durability as their chief, virtuosic assets. Ms. Yang, only twenty-one years of age, might have invoked the spirit of Teresa Carreno or Olga Samaroff for the sheer bravura and exuberant panache of her piano style.

Yang opened with an extended Brahms group, the Four Pieces, Op. 119 and the punishing Paganini Variations, the latter as close as the conservative Brahms ever came to emulating his stylistic opposite, Liszt. Two sides of Brahms emerged: the “old-bachelor and rainy-day” music, and the knotty, Herculean virtuoso, the heir to Schumann’s Kreisleriana and the keyboard counterpart to Niccolo Paganini’s violin wizardry, respectively. The B Minor Intermezzo, with its harmonic vagaries, rose to an insistent climax that might have hinted at the serialists to follow Brahms in Vienna. The E Minor swayed, wistfully nervous. Yang played the C Major as a miniature touch-piece or scampering toccata, flashing colors rather boldly and providing a natural energy for the concluding E-flat Rhapsody, where even in his abandon, Brahms cannot help reverting to sonata-form. The Paganini Variations, Books I and II, consume any artist’s technique amid a whirlwind of textural, touch, and harmonic effects, the piano alternately a percussive or stringed instrument. The bariolage effects for the piano dazzle the ear as much as the huge glissandi, block chords, and cembalom applications. Yang’s diapason of colors, her sprezzitura, ran from delicate coaxing and alla musette sonority to the severest hammer blows to which the instrument and the audience had to grant total submission.

Yang began the second half with a modern signature-piece, the Sonata No. 1 (1990) by Australian composer Carl Vine. Ms. Yang prefaced the performance with a brief series of remarks, in which she characterized the 17-minute work as “vividly imagistic. . .a splash of cold water in your face” that includes a “roller-coaster” of effects. In two movements of unequal length, a la Beethoven’s Op. 111, Vine’s sonata might be labeled “the Four Temperaments,” for its mercurial, driving series of affects. A ground theme wends itself in an array of mostly tonal transformations, invoking hard, encrusted szofzati, quiet interludes, and pungently momentous, pounding chords. The audience, if it did not warm to the music, could well appreciate the digital prowess and sheer victory of musical memory it took Yang to recall and execute so many notes.

Schumann’s elegant series of musical portraits, his eternally popular Carnaval, Op. 9, concluded the program proper. These pearly “little scenes on four notes” capture Schumann’s inner life, his breast of two souls, and any number of musical anagrams that suggest the labyrinths of his complex personality, musical and literary. Yang gave us an emboldened, freshly glossed performance, glittering and palpably romantic in nature. At once ingenuous and ingenious, the parade of musical and autobiographical personalities breezed by and waltzed by, marched by and fairy-taled their way in our collective hearts. Yang’s playing reminded us why we remain so fond of this self-serving, artistic egoism in music And by the time we closed ranks for the grand march against philistinism, we, like Goethe before us, could well exclaim that when we reached for our hats to leave, we found we had lost our heads. Quite an electric evening from a young, extremely gifted pianist with a world of music before her.