If I were restricted to attending only one concert in Kansas City this season, the choice would be easy: the recital Ivan Moravec will play at 8 p.m. Friday at the Folly Theater.

The 65-year-old Czech pianist isn't exactly a household word. He doesn't get the press and record store play routine for the likes of Alfred Brendel and Murray Perahia. For years Communist travel restrictions inhibited his concertizing abroad.

But among connoisseurs of pianism, Moravec (pronounced "MORE-uh-vets") has been something of a cult figure since the 1960s, when he made a series of ravishingly beautiful recordings for the now-defunct Connoisseur Society label.

Now reissued on a pair of Nonesuch CDs, Moravec's survey of the Chopin nocturnes “has been justly regarded as one of the great Chopin recordings of all time,” writes Don Manildi, head of the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland. The VAI and Vox labels have reissued other landmark Moravec recordings of music by Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. Franck, Debussy and Ravel, and, more recently, Dorian has recorded him in Chopin and Schumann.

The last time Moravec played in Kansas City, two years ago, his Chopin reduced at least one hearer to tears. “It was playing that seemed from another world,” The Kansas City Star review opined, “deliriously unpredictable, every note suffused with magic, innocent of routine or rule-book expressivity.”

Chopin is on the program for Moravec's return this week - the B flat minor Sonata (which, unfortunately, Moravec never has recorded). Completing the program, presented by the Friends of Chamber Music, will be Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Debussy's Estampes and Leos Janacek's In the Mist.

Apart from a brief sojourn in London, shortly after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Moravec has made his home in his native Prague. His first love was, and is, opera - which should be no surprise, given the rich, singing tone of his piano playing.

“The human voice has the most possibilities of shadings and personal expression,” Moravec says by phone from a New England stopover, his English capable but richly accented. “I'm always trying for that with the piano, and hoping for instruments with a longer sound - that's what makes the legato possible.”

Indeed, in Moravec's hands, the piano seems the utter antithesis of a percussion instrument. Notes aren't so much struck as set aglow. And tonal color is a real priority.

“I think it's a deep desire somewhere in me,” he says. “I hear the music with many colors. I don't imagine green or rose, but nuances of sound. The more richly I can modulate a melody, the happier I am.”

That Moravec is playing at all is almost a miracle. At age 18, while ice-skating, he fell and suffered a spinal injury that kept him away from the piano for five years. For a time it looked as though he might never play again.

“It looked very bad,” he recalls. “It was a test, the hardest of my life. But since I was young, it somehow came back together.”

Once Moravec began concertizing, after World War II, he had to endure that plague on many another great artist from behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain: travel restrictions.

“The authorities took my passport two or three times during the Communist regime.” he says. “I lost many wonderful tours through the inability to go there, and the concert societies didn't want to risk other cancellations.”

Much as it may have dampened his international career, however, the restriction on travel wasn't entirely a curse.

“In the sense of going deeper into music and life - in that sense it was almost a blessing,” Moravec says. “An easy life doesn't necessarily produce a deep artist.”

Moravec studied at the Prague Conservatory and Academy and took some lessons in Italy with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, another legendary poet of the piano. But from the beginning, he also learned from recordings; he names Rachmaninoff, Lipatti, Gieseking and Michelangeli as artists he particularly admired.

What about Cortot, whose richly nuanced Chopin is perhaps the closest to Moravec's?

“Oh, yes,” Moravec says. “His (Chopin) B flat minor Sonata is one of my greatest favorites. He combines a manly feeling - very deep, manly feeling, not cheap or sentimental - with some sort of heroic sound. I think that if there were more people who played Chopin like Cortot, the cult of Chopin would be even greater than it is.”