Pianist Kevin Kenner gave a spectacular all-Chopin recital—celebrating the composer’s bi-centennial—at Le Petit Trianon Theatre, Saturday March 20, 2010 under the auspices of the Steinway Society the Bay Area. Organizing his Chopin groups into assemblages of four, each culminating with one of the set of complete scherzo, Kenner found his Muse among the early works of Chopin composed between 1828-1830, the period that marks Chopin’s departure from his native Poland to cosmopolitan Paris.

The decision to play four sets of Chopin groups Attacca—without pause between selected pieces—proved at first disconcerting, especially to an audience hungry to applaud, but it no less forced the auditors to savor Chopin’s works in a “salon atmosphere” conducive to an appreciation of his harmonic and structural evolution, especially as the four Scherzos mark a decided advance over his early style.

Kenner opened with a Viennese Waltz in E Major that swaggered and flirted, its moment of militant assertion often clouded by meters that intruded into mazurka territory. And so, the Mazurka in C, Op. 68, No. 1 and Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 7, No. 2 (in its original version) took up a countrified, sometimes melancholy dance that exploited bravura filigree from Hummel and those composers whose links refer to Mozart and Haydn. The Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor, Op. 20, however, announced in broad terms Kenner’s serious intent, a toccata with demonic aspirations in the outer sections, contrasted with a most tender Polish noel for a trio. The colossal shifts in tone and affect gave us no small hint at the sullen power and impulsive ferocity invested in Chopin’s large pieces.

Group two began with an early Polonaise in G-flat Major, “Les adieux de Varsovie” (1828), one of many “hybrid” pieces that transform a national dance style into an etude, a nocturne, or Chopin’s equivalent of a Schubert impromptu. This “Farewell to Warsaw” imitated horn calls in the left hand and called for the crossing of hands as a gesture to new possibilities. Tragic and dramatic militancy likewise informed the Mazurka in C-sharp Minor, Op. 6, No. 2. The Nocturne in C-sharp Minor is that same. poetic piece we hear in the film The Pianist, with its reminiscence of the F Minor Piano Concerto, haunted, lyrical, and executed with a noble repose by Kenner. The Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 31 stands perpetually as among Chopin’s signature composition, here endowed with stunning attacks from Kenner, whose opening groups were no less fusillades and cannons. As limpid in its trio as its outer sections proved tumultuous, this piece testified to the certifiable bite in Kenner’s expressive arsenal, a tour de force to end the first half of an inflamed program.

The Polonaise in F Minor, Op. 71, No. 3 started group three of the evening, this 1828 hybrid but intimate piece utilizing canonic entries and slow to assume its inevitable, national contours. The Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 3 presented us with a duet for the two hands, smoothly rendered. The F-sharp Mazurka from Op. 6 betrays that metric ambiguity that Meyerbeer found disconcerting, the beat moving from first to second beat whimsically and fluidly. Then the C-sharp Minor Scherzo, Op. 39 (1839), grand, apocalyptic, Faustian. At first, Kenner pounced upon it with blistering speed, perhaps endangering its arched lines; but the Promethean gestures soon resolved into those pearly, cleanly articulated chorales answered by melancholy runs, only too soon advancing, da capo e coda, to its explosive, febrile confrontation between Gretchen and Mephisto, if one must have a “program” for such an absolutely passionate expression of the Romantic Age.

The final group of four opened with Souvenir de Paganini (1829), the so-called Carnival of Venice variants carried off with uncanny aplomb in homage to the Mediterranean spirit and to its demonic progenitor of the violin, Niccolo Paganini. Essentially a gondola song, its moody watercolor variants seemed with Kenner as a grand preparation for the later Barcarolle, Op. 60. The D Major Mazurka following cast a spritely air in peasant colors. Then the B Minor Valse, Op. 69. No. 2, whose intimations of mortality take pages from Schubert’s examples, his inexhaustible, spun-out style of laendler and German Dances.

And lastly, the skittish hybrid Scherzo No. 4 in E Major, Op. 54, as elusive to define as it is to pigeonhole structurally. Kenner bestowed a devotee’s affection on the E Major’s plastic evolution of form and harmony, its elegant middle section a transparent nocturne far removed from the sea of troubles below its harmonic mists. In what could only be construed as organ sonority, Kenner took the last pages with percussive abandon, as Chopin seems to have anticipated every future permutation of Ravel.

Only one encore graced this exhaustive window in to the Chopin ethos: a little valse-mazurka Chopin deliberately designates “senza fine,” with no proper ending. If it were up to the Steinway Society audience, the aristocrat Kenner would be there still, playing this charming work forever.