Without moving a millimetre more than necessary at the keyboard, and with the humble air of a craftsman, pianist Ivan Moravec gave performances of outstanding beauty, refinement and intelligence at the recital hall of the North York Performing Arts Centre on Wednesday night.

The Czech pianist opened the concert with a terse, dramatic reading of Beethoven's Thirty-two Variations in C Minor. The rest of the evening belonged to Gallic and Slavic muses.

In a Chopin group as well as seven Debussy Preludes, Moravec drew magical colours and textures from the recital hall's Hamburg Steinway, without lapsing into self-indulgence. But I was equally impressed by his unfailing attention to large-scale harmonic and dramatic structure.

I can't recall hearing as coherent and compelling an interpretation of Chopin's oft-bashed Ballade in G Minor as Moravec gave on Wednesday. The opening measures contained the whole drama in embryo. The bold, rising line suddenly fell back on itself, as if constricted, and the dissonance before the entrance of the main theme was unusually marked.

These tensions developed into a fight-to-the-finish between more innocent-sounding themes that gravitate to the major mode, and disruptive, often chromatic impulses that churn things up and pull toward the darkness of G Minor. The notoriously difficult coda was not the Rambo-style affair usually inflicted on audiences, but a hair-raising triumph of the chaotic forces.

In Chopin's Etude in C-sharp minor, Op. 25 No.7, Moravec drew the listener into an intimate, spontaneous-sounding dialogue. Every detail of the musical canvas conveyed a new turn of thought - the melting of a left-hand phrase into an unresolved harmony; speech-like interruptions and hesitations, for instance.

Chopin's Barcarolle seemed like a troubled soliloquy that arrives at a sense of affirmation and confidence. In the Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17 No.4 (one of three encores), the play of regular and irregular phrase lengths suggested a tension between confinement and freedom, while Moravec's superb control of harmonic tensions kept the audience on the edge of their seats.

In the Debussy, I especially loved the elusiveness that Moravec gave the ending of each Prelude, as if casting an air of unreality and mystery over the images we had just been seduced by.