Former Gilmore Young Artist Award Winner Adam Neiman played a virtuoso recital at San Jose’s Le Petit Trianon Theatre, Sunday, December 7, offering a program that included music by Beethoven, Chopin, Ravel, Franck, and Neiman himself. Comparatively still youthful (b. 1978), Neiman proffered us a stately, audacious version of Beethoven’s Op. 110 Sonata that testified to a wealth of (musical) experience, consistent with his vision of Beethoven as a conqueror of adversity. Neiman, too, had to persuade a recalcitrant, overly bright Steinway that its treble could submit to a less than hammer-blow approach to coax a heterogeneous palette from its hard patina. After passing through a first movement of relative peace and hazy security, the martial Allegro molto proved a spitfire affair, molten and agitated. The great Adagio ma non troppo; Fuga proceeded with somber authority, alternating recitativo passages with sad arioso; finally achieving a grand synthesis of opposing energies. Luminous and impassioned, the Beethoven pointed a prophetic finger at more good music to follow.

Neiman then followed with Ravel’s suite of Miroirs, studies in touch and vibrant figuration in the Liszt tradition but cross-fertilized by Symbolist poetry. Noctuelles enjoyed a macabre blend of stops and starts, frenetic flutters and crisp, repeated notes. The Sad Birds took notes from Schumann’s Waldszenen and liquefied the figures into waterfowl. Rough undertow threatened to capsize Une barque sur l’ocean, but brilliant filigree and steady pulse saved our Captain and our Fearful Trip. The cynical, bravura figures of Alborada del gracioso may well have been the highlight of the suite, with its sudden urgings of dissipation and Spanish sensuousness, in the form of keen repeated notes and fierce glissandi, wrought in a manner worthy of Katchen and Fleisher. The final section, La Vallee des cloches, seemed to leave us in a Salvador Dali canvas, where time and knolling bells melt into each other, timbrels from the world of Poe and Mallarme.

The second half of Neiman’s recital softened, at first, those fingers of steel into poised velvet, with Chopin’s F Major Nocturne, Op. 15, No. 1; but even here, its dreamy, opening rhetoric yielded to a sudden storm, passionate and hectic. The Ballade in F Minor, moreover, conveyed a series of often spectacular contraries, intimacy follwed by intense, emotional violence, even a paroxysm of despair. Robust colors emanated from Neiman’s keyboard, particularly in Chopin’s knotty stretti, wherein the passions seem layered on each other, a veritable Witches’ Brew of Romantic Agony.

Neiman’s own short work, “Visions,” made a pleasant debut at these concerts; it purports to be a kind of musical equivalent of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” a transparent series of figures that take us to places “long ago and far away.” Often, the sonorities echoed Rachmaninov, especially one of his etudes-tableaux (or the slow movement from the Op. 5 Suite for Two Pianos), for arpeggiation and monochromatic affect. Neiman proved rather a foil to the next piece, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale et Fugue, whose severe classical lines tend to compress the rhapsodic, even exultant, character of his ethos. The B Minor theme glides into organ diapason, absorbing much of the keyboard; then, the chorale exploits the crossing of hands, in the manner of Liszt’s “Un sospiro.” Neiman often converted the steely sonority into another water-piece, an adumbration of Debussy and Ravel. The lines of the Fugue rang clarion and decisive, with Neiman’s speeding up the tempo to a final peroration of power and fury, signifying much of this young artist’s complete grasp of the repertory he champions. His encore, the venerable Prelude in C from Bach’s WTC, Book I, in its sweet simplicity, conveyed a devotion as much religious as it was musical. Shades of Elly Ney, who in this reviewer’s opinion, played this piece to perfection—saying much for Mr. Neiman, whose musical progress will well bear watching.