Garrick Ohlsson has been celebrated on the concert stage ever since he won the International Chopin Piano Competition at age 22. That’s 42 years ago, and he’s still going strong. Last season he returned to Chopin in honor of that composer’s 200th birthday. This season he is doing the same for Franz Liszt, who was born October 22, 1811.

Ohlsson returned to the President’s Piano Series at the University of Washington Wednesday night with a program of a Liszt transcription of Bach, a Busoni transcription of Liszt, both these of organ works, plus four of Liszt’s most famous pieces, all of which pose major technical challenges for the performer. (Closing out the series this season is Angela Hewitt on May 15.)

Liszt was renowned for his pianistic ability, his technique being so incredible that just about any piano music was easy for him technically, and the music he wrote for himself often almost impossible for others to encompass.

Liszt was very tall for the era, about 6′ 2″, while Ohlsson is 6′ 4″. Liszt’s hands are described as long and narrow with long fingers; Ohlsson’s hands looked like spider’s legs moving with amazing speed and lightness over the keys.

There’s a description of Liszt’s playing in an unidentified music magazine of around 1900:

In the fortissimo passages his tone was immense, and his pianissimos were the most delicate whispers. In these, his fingers glided over the keys with inconceivable lightness and speed, and the tone fell upon the ear with a delicate tracery with which no particular note was lost by reason of speed or lightness.

I found this quote today, and it’s exactly what I thought of Ohlsson’s Wednesday night performance.

Liszt’s transcription of Bach’s “great” Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor is unmistakeably still Bach, particularly the Fugue which is barely touched and which Ohlsson played with exquisite articulation and phrasing. Liszt embellishes the Fantasy so that the piano most nearly approximates the organ sound with all its stops, and the whole has the majesty of the original with Ohlsson using plenty of pedal to enhance it further.

The Busoni transcription of Liszt’s massive and seemingly rambling Fantasia and Fugue on the Chorale Ad nos, ad salutarem undam does the same as Liszt does for Bach, adding more sonorities to recreate the organ sound. While Ohlsson gave it a remarkable performance, the work seems too much to take in in one bite, like an over-rich meal that is too lavish, matter how delicious.

The four shorter works of the concert’s second half showed various facets of Liszt, the Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este and the Feux Follets on the airy side, while the Funérailles and Mephisto Waltz No. 1 were more intense.

In Ohlsson’s Jeux one could hear all different kinds of moving water, from sparkling drops flung from fountains to rippling streams in larger or smaller bodies, to the power of waterfalls, while the quicksilver playfulness of Feux Follets had Ohlsson’s fingers whisking all over the instrument always without tension and feathery light or crisp as needed.

Funérailles first made sense to me played on an 1856 Erard piano, such as Liszt used, and where the bass register had much more clarity and sonority than today’s grand. However, the sound in both bass register and the topmost register on Wednesday’s piano both lacked the somewhat dull effect we so often get, both shining out with more depth and color. Much of Funérailles takes place in that lowest register, and it was possible to hear clearly in Ohlsson’s performance the pounding hooves, the funeral march, the somber richness of the work. And in Mephisto, we heard the brightness and fun seguéing into devilish frenzy.

All these colors and impressions come through in Ohlsson’s playing, and nothing can be more tender in gentle passages.