Music by Schubert, Bach, and Schoenberg provided British pianist Imogen Cooper (b. 1949) plenty of imaginative firepower to display her plain-spoken virtuosity before a delighted crowd at Le Petit Trianon Theatre, San Jose, Sunday, March 22. Even her one encore, Schubert’s 16 German Dances (1823), as performed on a Steinway Cooper had managed to subdue to her own dynamic specifications, both purred and sparkled with regal, uncompromising intelligence and Viennese éclat, qualities she may well have imbibed from her mentors Brendel and Badura-Skoda.

Cooper opened with Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 826, a six-movement suite of dances that rang percussive only for a moment as the outset, in the Sinfonia, a French Overture in dotted rhythm, before Cooper quelled its clangor with brilliant adjustments of touch and pedal, making the ensuing Allegro moderato just one of a set of pearly, streamlined motions in figured inevitability. If the Allemande and Courante exerted evenness of tone and articulation of staccati and piercing intonation, the Sarabande played as a subdued, contrapuntal cradle song in studied grades of velvet. Virile, aggressive, the Rondeau and Capriccio enjoyed all sorts of syncopations and motor effects, elastic and resonant, and particularly pert when the latter tune appeared against its own inversion.

Cooper then presented the set of Six Moments Musicaux, D. 780 of Schubert (1828), a sequence of haunted moods and introspective affects in the composer’s syntax. From music-box sonority to almost abject harps of melancholy, the pieces capture the essence of the Schubert salon or Schubertiad, whose central inspiration remains the lied. That Cooper made Schubert sing became her main focus: a serenity of mood and technical resources marked each of these pieces, from the C Major opener--with its staggered melos--to the aggressive F Minor No. 5, only a hair’s breadth from the storms of Beethoven. The dark A-flat Major (No. 2) exuded somber thoughts of mortality, rife with resignation. The popular F Minor two-step Cooper kept light and airy, a bouncy march with modest hopes. The C-sharp Minor makes several bows to Bach, its running ostinato yielding to a simple vocalization without guile. Finally, in the A-flat Major, No. 6, Cooper gave vent to Schubert’s expressive but restrained agonies, the effect almost gasping in its approximation of chamber music for a solo instrument.

The return from intermission brought Cooper to the Six Little Pieces, Op. 19 of serialist Arnold Schoenberg (1911), masterpieces of concentration and syntactical pulverization. Universes in a nutshell, they may resonate with Hamlet’s sense of confinement: rhythmic impulses and melodic extensions are minimal, and Cooper gave no indication, aside from her occasional swirling color or crossed hands, how much intensity she had to exert to project alternately delicate or jagged harmonizations. Emily Dickinson’s epigrams on imminent death seemed apt. One of the latter pieces plays as a requiem to Gustav Mahler, always cognizant that Mahler speculated on whether one, single tone--in various colors and timbres--could sustain a piece of some duration.

Attacca--no pause--and the furious world of Schubert’s C Minor Sonata, D. 958 erupted before us, much of its motor impetus taken from Beethoven. Aggressive then bittersweet, Cooper tried to bask, when she could, in Schubert’s exquisite modal shifts, often enharmonic “puns” on the main-key progressions. When the dark progressions exploded in emotional urgency, the limits of sonata-form itself seemed tested. Both outer movements exploited fierce stretti and manic tremolos and ostinati, occasionally alluding to Beethoven directly, like the Andante from Beethoven’s Sonata in D, Op. 28. One could hardly credit Cooper for having performed a “Menuetto” as a third movement, its agogics not caring for a waltz nor totally at ease as a scherzo. The last movement Allegro, a galloping, inflamed rondo, yearned for transcendence, even hinting at rhetorical figures in the great B-flat Major Sonata, Op. 960. But the relentless grip of Fate had Cooper blatantly moved, her expression that of one who has journeyed to familiar yet ever-subversive territory.