Under the rubric “Hommage,” pianist Gwendolyn Mok inaugurated the 2008-2009 season of the Steinway Society the Bay Area with a brilliant, grand recital Sunday, September 14 at Le Petit Trianon Theatre. Alternating between a pungent Steinway D and her own restored Erard instrument, Mok offered an ambitious program of Haydn, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Ravel, each of whose work paid tribute to a musical and personal dedicatee who had inspired the rhetoric and passion and nostalgia.

Currently Coordinator of Keyboard Studies at San Jose State University School of Music and Dance, Gwendolyn Mok enjoys the distinction of having been French pianist Vlado Perlemuter’s last pupil, so she bears the mantle of that prodigious performer’s understanding of the mysteries of Maurice Ravel’s oeuvre, which easily embraces aspects of the French clavecin tradition and much of Liszt. This evening, playing the silver-toned Erard, Mok proffered Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin as her final entre, six exquisitely molded epigraphs to a fallen acquaintance of World War I, set as a baroque suite in that intimate, fabricated style that Stravinsky called the product of “a master watchmaker.” Mok coaxed her Erard into a panoply of variegated, often pellucid colors, ranging from carillons to stately court dances, noble canters and Ravel’s calling card, the jaunty then manic toccata that eventually explodes of its own uncanny momentum, as do all of Ravel’s invocations of the dances of a lost age.

Mok opened with Haydn’s poignant, empfindamkeit opus, the double-themed Variations in F Minor (1793), which has had acolytes as far ranging as Backhaus, Curzon, and Dohnanyi. Mok played this Manichean piece of minor/major duality for its grace and pearly introspection, its trills and occasional parlando-arioso style already an adumbration of Chopin or Beethoven‘s Op. 57 “Appassionata.” Mok’s roulades at the end of cadences resonated with particular acumen, the light and shadow quite piquant. To end the first half, Mok presented us Schumann’s mighty Fantasia in C Major, Op. 17 (1836), a piece intended to celebrate a monument to Beethoven by incorporating a quotation from that master’s song-cycle To the Distant Beloved, Op. 98, but hearkening even further back to Schein’s Banquetto Musicale and forward to hints at Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Tempestuous and declamatory, the three-movement work surges with Romantic Agony, often fusing elements of the nocturne and the ballade, utilizing or denying aspects of sonata-form as suit the composer’s ecstatic whims. The first movement’s “In the style of a legend” designation certainly had Mok attentive to the graduated agogics and shifting dynamics of the piece. The second movement, a syncopated march or maerchen (fairy-tale adventure) had the Steinway clamoring for heroic effects interrupted by skittering intermezzi. The last movement, based on an arpeggio echoing Beethoven’s Op. 27, No. 2, calls on a sentiment from Schlegel to resonate a repeated A as a shining star in Schumann’s personal firmament.

Having introduced her Erard to the audience, Mok proceeded after the intermission with Mendelssohn’s mercurial Variations Serieuses, Op. 54, another piece designed to celebrate Beethoven, but equally cognizant of Bach’s fugal and toccata style, which alternate through the theme and seventeen variants, some of which exploit the sprezzatura of the instrument to achieve a distinctly vocal character. The more bravura episodes, calling for huge spans, broad octave runs, arpeggios and even a chorale style, Mok negotiated all the while maintaining a steady, internal pulse that almost defines the Romantic sensibility from Dussek, to Schubert, to Chopin and Liszt. As for Liszt, Mok let the poet Petrarch speak through two Sonetti, Nos. 123 and 104, the latter of which has had the likes of Rubinstein and Horowitz among its acolytes. Petrarch’s conceits, “I freeze, I burn” as inspirators of these limpid figures, had Mok’s relishing the sound of her preferred Erard to evoke the infinite degrees of ecstasy Liszt embraces, sacred and profane. As an example of an intelligent musician’s making intelligent music passionate and convincing, Ms. Mok’s recital made a most auspicious debut for the present Steinway season.