When Ivan Moravec walked on to the stage of the Ford Centre's George Weston Recital Hall, generations of piano wisdom seemed to accompany him.

It wasn't that he cultivated a flamboyant style, reminiscent of Paderewski or de Pachmann; nor was it that he played in a manner more retrospective than contemporary in sensibility.

Rather it was that he did just about everything the way it should have been done, with no grandstanding, no histrionics, no intrusion of ego between the printed page and his audience's ears.

A trim, balding figure of central European ancestry (he was bom in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1930), he has been a pianist's pianist for a generation and more, turning out a succession of fine LP and CD recordings on mostly small labels without ever achieving the fame of a Vladimir Ashkenazy or an Alfred Brendel.

And yet, there is in his playing such structural understanding, such a just sense of proportions, such a clear view of the direction of the composer's thinking, that one is immediately reminded of Arturo Toscanini's paean of highest praise: "Is like the score."

He began his Livent-sponsored recital Friday night with three Intermezzi, a Capriccio and a Rhapsody by Brahms. Although I was initially surprised by the subdued level at which he began playing the A Major Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2, this piece was, after all, a mellow product of Brahms's composing twilight

And as Moravec moved from piece to piece, the aptness of his dynamics, tempi and range of expression became increasingly evident.

There was no underlining, no stretching of phrases for emotional affect. The music emerged in an utterly natural way.

It continued to flow naturally through his performances of Beethoven's overplayed Pathetique and Moonlight Sonatas. Only on this occasion there was none of the usual dramatizing.

Moravec played the music straight, in a focused, linear manner, with the finale of the Moonlight fully living up to its presto marking.

His skills as a colorist came into play in three of the Book I Images of Debussy, the shimmering textures and shifting rhythms of Reflets dans I'eau recreated with particular success.

And then, as a capstone to his program, he offered the fourth and finest of Chopin's Ballades, the F minor, balancing the poetry of its earlier episodes with a suitably virtuoso climax.

Not that he looked very much like a virtuoso when playing it.

Moravec's composed posture at the keyboard and the hovering manner of his digital attack eschewed flamboyance in favor of control. Plenty of pianists offer more to look at. Fewer by far produce so much music.

Before Ivan Moravec had even reached the piano at the George Weston Recital Hall stage on Friday, something in the 67-year-old Czech pianist's dignified yet modest bearing made one feel that music was already in the hall, and that he was perely going to pass it on to us - a true interpreter in the etymological sense of a mediator, agent or broker.

The ensuing recital of music by Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy and Chopin confirmed that intuition, though it was not perhaps as consistent as his last recital on the same stage in 1994.

It's hard to imagine a finer performance of Chopin's Ballade No. 4 in F Minor than the one that concluded Friday's recital. Moravec put his colourisric skills to brilliant - not decorative - use. Inner voices sang out unexpectedly, only to return at a crucial dramatic point.

Most important, this sectional piece, which is so often reduced to a sentimental warhorse, unfolded with the power, inevitability and wholeness of a Greek tragedy. Flawlessly attuned to harmonic and textural structure, Moravec knew exactly where to linger reflectively, where to surge forward, where to let emotional power accumulate gradually over several pages.

The left hand churned its way through a dense, modulating passage, then burst unexpectedly into shimmering light when it broke through to a new plateau - a harmony that turns out to herald the return to the home key. The suspended chords before the coda seemed to offer a last ray of light - but they turned out to be the prayers of the doomed, for all was extinguished in the nightmarish coda that followed; mere fragments of the piece seemed to be flying about as if in a maelstrom, or within a disintegrating mind.

Debussy is another of Moravec's specialties, and on Friday the first movement of the composer's Images (Reflets dans I'eau) was a miracle of spontaneity and immediacy. We weren't invited merely to contemplate a scene, but were plunged into it, experiencing, with an almost primal joy the shimmer and wildness of the play of water and light.

A slightly perfunctory third movement in the same set left this listener untouched; so, for some reason, did Moravec's Brahms, despite the pianist's expert use of colouration in his selection of five pieces. Yet I loved the Rhapsody in C Minor, Op. 79 No. 2, because Moravec made it unpredictable and improvisatory, giving the lie to the cliche of program annotators that the title of this highly organized work is a misnomer.

But in some ways the jaw-dropper of the evening was the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 27 No. 2 - the so-called Moonlight Sonata. Having inwardly groaned when I saw this chestnut next up on the program, within two measures I was on the edge of my seat. Moravec, using his superb command of pianistic colour, conjured a spell-binding poetic world. The theme maintained a poignant stillness over the constant flow of triplets; one could imagine these latter as a supportive voice, or another level of memory, or the voice of time - and mortality - itself.

I wasn't as bowled over by the rest of the Sonata, or by Moravec's interpretation of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 13 (The Pathetique), despite the rhythmic power he brought to the latter's first movement. But there still was enough poetry in this recital to sustain the lucky audience for months to come.