Piano virtuoso Jon Nakamatsu concluded the 2008-09 season of the Steinway Society the Bay Area with a fine recital at the McAfee Theatre, Saratoga, Saturday, May 2. With music by Clementi, Schumann, and Chopin, Nakamatsu demonstrated his sympathy for the Romantic temperament, its gestures, its rhetorical guises and conceits, its penchant for the grand style. If the recital did not bring poetic revelations, it certainly confirmed Nakamatsu’s status as a serviceable artist with strong, deft hands and a passionate intellect behind the music he champions.

Nakamatsu opened with a work that had occasionally warranted the interest of the legendary Vladimir Horowitz, the Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 25, No. 5 (1790) of Muzio Clementi, the famed virtuoso-pedagogue and contemporary of Mozart and Beethoven. The sonata as a whole seemed fashioned to show off precisely the virtues of Christofori’s instrument, the pianoforte, as a percussive, brilliant purveyor of right-hand fioritura, roulades, cascades, and scintillating scales. The first movement might be construed as a toccata in music-box sonority, having Nakamatsu pedal his Steinway to assume a transparency more in keeping with the more modest clavichord, although the sforzati and chain-melodies did not lack for glitter. The second movement, Lento e patetico, proved a n affecting aria in the “emotional” style favored by Bach’s sons. The Presto, another arioso-style toccata, allowed Nakamatsu some room for digital flight, the scale passages doubling at the third to vivid effect.

Few keyboard suites capture the Romantic ethos quite so well as Schumann’s Carnaval, Op. 9 (1834), his brisk, anagrammatical reflections on Jean-Paul’s novel Flegeljahre (“Years of Indiscretion”), sutured seamlessly to aspects of the Commedia dell’arte and note-values assigned from Schumann’s own personae, both real and literary. Nakamatsu took the high, optimistic road in this dazzling array of character-sketches and musical polemics against culture-Philistines. If the performance carried a self-conscious bravura and eclat, it no less provided dazzling pirouettes and flirtations for Pierrot, Arlequin, and Coquette. The Papillons, dancing letters on four notes of both Schumann’s name and the town of one of his beaux, fervently displayed any number of digital pyrotechnics with requisite schwung, while Paganini made clear the transfer of the violin’s bariolage technique to the keyboard tablature. Syncopations, three-voice harmony, octave displacement are but a few of the resources Schumann exploits in the cause of “masking,” hiding an initial motif in its own permutations. For the poetic gestures, Chiarina and Chopin, Nakamatsu waxed more prosaic, a tendency that could make glib or belie his sensitivity in the Chopin B Minor Sonata. But Nakamatsu could project pungent wit, too, with his deliberate foreshortening of a lat chord’s decay in order to undercut the music’s sentimentality. After an ironic “Pause,” the March of the David-Leaguers adumbrated Moussorgsky’s Great Gate of Kiev; and the venerable cast of characters once more passed before us like Toulouse-Lautrec’s last, mortal visions do, to bid a fond adieu, at the end of John Huston’s Moulin Rouge.

The Chopin B Minor Sonata, Op. 58 (1844), launched without preliminaries, comprised Nakamatsu’s post-intermission piece, four movements in loose collaboration but motivated by a dark, demonic pathos and intricate, idiosyncratic harmonic syntax. Nakamatsu did not take the first movement repeat, but he did move from a relatively stolid exposition into the Chopin musings with increased serenity and inner pulsation, as though Nakamatsu had to warm to the occasion. A bristling, nervous Scherzo segued to that haunted Lento, a nocturne that implodes in its own dream, a march-fantasy that often dropped through the bar lines into timeless space. Nakamatsu applied a rocking rhythm to the Presto non tanto last movement, rife with the storms and stresses of a poet’s wrestling with his own mortality.

Hardly a surprise that the enthusiastic audience for their “native son” demanded an encore: in this case, the timely Rondo capriccioso, Op. 14 of Felix Mendelssohn, whose opening echoes Schubert’s “An die Musik,” which then yields to the composer’s irresistible, diaphanous impulse for Shakespeare’s faeries. But it was the second encore, Beethoven’s eternal Moonlight Sonata first movement, played at the cut-time tempo the composer indicates, that sold Nakamatsu as a thinker’s virtuoso. Unsentimentally rendered, the work gained from a palpable sonority that might have been lacking for much of the evening, an ability to “make tone” that gave the Sonata quasi fantasia an especial directness and grace that outshone the more blatantly flamboyant pieces that had preceded it.