A bit of name-dropping to separate the connoisseurs of piano playing from the groupies:

Vladimir Horowitz.

Too easy. Horowitz is to the piano as Hershey is to chocolate.

Arthur Rubinstein. Trick question. The groupie would figure the H in Arthur is a misprint, rather than a letter that impresario Sol Hurok dropped to give the pianist extra box-office cachet. (Rubinstein restored the H and told the tale in his autobiography.)

Ivan Moravec. Now we're talking. It takes a piano connoisseur not to say, "Who?"

***

Not much about the chunky, balding appearance and mild, courtly manner of Moravec send signals that say "star."

His kind of star power is heard rather than seen.

With the passing of the early 20th-century generation of keyboard giants - Horowitz, Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Claudio Arrau, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Rudolf Firkusny - the 64-year-old Moravec gradually has become a leading inheritor of their late-romantic/early modern legacy.

The Czech pianist, who will perform Tuesday at Virginia Commonwealth University, is sometimes dubbed in critical shorthand a pianistic "poet." That means he is more concerned with quality of tone than with quantity, dexterity or showmanship, and that he favors composers, such as Chopin and Debussy, with similar priorities.

"To move the fingers fast, that's something almost everybody does," Moravec said recently. "More important than speed or volume is making a tone, something you do first in the mind."

Responding to their minds' ears, pianists' bodies behave differently, Moravec observed in a telephone interview from New York. "Arthur Rubinstein, who had a very substantial, very virile tone, put pressure on the piano keys with his whole arm." Russian virtuoso Sviatoslav Richter, "when he really wanted to produce a fortissimo, moved the whole shoulder. Others may use only the pressure of the fingers...

"There is no special way of pressing a (piano) key; it can be fast or slow or in between. But when you see the hands of a pianist, you can almost guess from his motion the sort of tone he will produce."

***

Moravec might have naturally matured into the subtle, color-sensitive, hand-centered keyboard technique for which he is celebrated.

But that technique was forced on him, just three years after he began to play, when he fell while ice-skating and injured his neck and spine. "I was 10 years old, and it gave me big troubles; in bad weather I can still feel this," he recalled in a 1991 interview with The Boston Globe. "I had to develop the technique of how to use intelligently the hands."

Necessity pushed Moravec into a school of pianists who, as he said, "have as their ideal a singing, legato tone." One was his most famous teacher, Arturo Benedetti Michaelangeli. Rubinstein and Dinu Lipatti, Moravec said, were others "who did everything possible to escape" the piano's essentially percussive mechanical character.

Too few modern pianists resist percussive playing, he believes. "The contemporary tendency is to build a very strong and metrical sound. That's the danger because of the instruments that are coming from the factories today. It is the tendency of a certain number of artists . . . and also the demand made of musicians who must play in huge concert halls."

Moravec said he is heartened by recent improvements in the instruments of American Steinway, especially in "the famous 'andante cantabile' section, the second and third octaves above middle C, which in the products of so many piano companies is sick or weak or aggressive or not beautiful enough.

"American Steinway, I think, has come to a very hopeful solution in that section. The sound is clean, slim, shining and does not have the problem of the little dirtiness that we encounter in so many instruments."

***

Shop talk like that endears Moravec to real fans of the instrument, and his hands-on attention has improved many hometown pianos.

"Someone said the voicing of a piano is a forgotten art," he said. "I try not to forget...

I am always trying to improve the quality of the instruments I find when I play on tour. I will invite the local technician to sit and discuss how we can benefit the piano. There are always ways to improve the tone of the whole instrument.

"What is not useful is speaking in vague terms. Saying 'I don't like it' is no help at all. But if I say, 'These notes are weaker than the rest,' the technician can do something and take pleasure in doing it."