Van Cliburn Competition Gold Medal winner for 2009 Haochen Zhang appeared before an enthusiastic audience Sunday, October 11 at the McAfee Center, Saratoga, under the auspices of the Steinway Society, the Bay Area. The youthful (aged 19) Mr. Zhang played an ambitious recital from the Romantics' arsenal of concert staples: the Chopin Op. 28 Preludes; the Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24; and the Spanish Rhapsody of Liszt. Crisp fingers and musical intelligence marked each evolution in the course of the night's progress, embracing distinct aspects of the Romantics' fascination with musical labyrinths and technical bravura.

The Chopin Op. 28 Preludes bestow upon us a Rosetta Stone for the Romantic ethos: no "prelude" conforms to any fixed standard, as they assume the character of mazurkas, abbreviated sonata-movements, nocturnes, etudes, or some alchemical combination thereof. Each of them basks in Chopin's idiosyncratic rhythm, sings as a vocalized instrumental expression, and enjoys he composer's immaculate skill at ornamentation. Zhang approached each of the twenty-four-as they traverse the circle of fifths-as a hurdle to be overcome while maintaining the string of pearls that connects them to one another. The symmetric C Major yielded to the asymmetrical A Minor, only to renew the journey on G and make an ineluctable progression to D Minor. The E Minor hinted at tragedy; the A Major diaphanously graced the air and disappeared. Zhang's leggerissimo D Major proved as fastidious as his granite octaves in the furious B-flat Minor. The No. 18 in E-flat hearkened to Schumann, while the C Minor No. 20 brought sad carillons from an abbreviated ballade. The E Major might have been a grim sojourn to Calvary, and its wicked trill a death knell. In the final group of four, he F Majorrang with limpid figures, only to plunge into the abyss in D Minor, whose solemn and fateful tolls needed an audience that heeds a fermata more thanits own convulsive urge to applaud.

The Brahms Handel Variations toss "classical" procedures at us as redolent with bravura and fire as Chopin's Romantic iconoclasm. Zhang established the B-flat Handel theme in clear, arched phrases and proceeded to the labyrinth of character pieces with speedy confidence. No dawdling, the variants melted into each other, though Zhang brought especial tenderness to the several siciliani that appear in the course of the transformations of the theme, which eventually opens harmonically from a fourth to a fifth. The Hungarian elements maintained their modal or gypsy color, while the alla musette or music-box variation (No. 22) whirled in Austrian figurations. Counterpoint Zhang made eminently clear, while the latter variants climbed Parnassus in a frightfully driven urge to stretto and the culminating four-voiced fugue. The voices, often played against themselves in inversion, attained a towering organ sonority, the last chords shimmering with a vital force and enthusiasm endemic to young and talented virtuosi.

The last piece of the concert proper, Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody (1858) had Zhang's savoring the delicious bravura with which Liszt invests he old "Folies d'espagne et jota aragonesa," set as an introduction and brief variations in ardent, rhetorically glamorous colors. Zhang added all kinds of pearls and steel in the fiery cadenza, moving seamlessly to the upbeat jota whose momentum threatened to explode in the manner of Ravel. It did occur to this reviewer that, given Zhang's manner of execution, his spiritual affinity to grand masters like Gyorgy Cziffra in this potent music, that Ravel (especially Miroirs) would provide a perfect vehicle for Zhang's clarion sonority. So, it was with a sense of aesthetic closure that, after his first encore, a wild, sectionalized Chinese folk dance, Zhang proffered the glittering, sensuous pastiche Ravel calls "Ondine" from his diabolical suite after Bertrand, Gaspard de la Nuit. Rippling, plastic, and technically serene, the siren called to all of us, inviting ecstasies at our own surrender to temptation. Zhang had made believers of us all.