The instrument is the same. The notes on the page are the same. And yet, like snow-flakes, no two pianists are alike. Ivan Moravec, one of the century's great Chopin interpreters, is a case in point. What, though, sets him apart?

Performing a selection of Chopin's Nocturnes, the G Minor Ballade and the Preludes, Op. 28, at the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts on Thursday, Moravec made some of the answers to that question obvious. The sound he produces on the piano, for instance, is deep, free, consistently beautiful, and so round that even his grace notes well like tear drops. He uses the pedal like a fragrance, subtle but pervasive. And his technique has long since left any obvious effort (or intent to impress, for that matter) behind. His coloratura simply occupies a part of physical space ruled by different laws of gravity.

We could call these the natural wonders of Moravec's playing - they appear to be almost automatic - whereas the not-so-natural wonders are where we can hear the actual deliberating that goes on in an interpretation. It's here that Moravec gets the most interesting, and a lot of it has to do with the independence of his right hand from his left. For Moravec doesn't line them up as a matter of course, though the slight stagger between the treble and the bass may be almost undetectable. Crisp is what his playing is not: That comes from a simultaneity in attack that doesn't much preoccupy Moravec, though he occasionally uses it to stunning effect. But the nap in the velvet, the warm, harp-like resonance that comes from that almost imperceptible arpeggiatipn, counts for more.

His two hands are rhythmically free with one another in a larger sense, as well, to the point where we may be surprised to hear poly-rhythms proceeding at quite different paces at a structural level of a piece. As for his beat, Moravec's inner metronome is a willful one. He loves to halt where others surge forward, to treat a melody like a bridge of stepping stones in a rushing current, slick and precarious. Hesitating ever so slightly, he gives us the sense of an improvisation not entirely premeditated. Or we hear one hand in urgent dialogue with the other: "I've got to be going," the accompaniment insists,' rushing ahead; "Oh but, wait!" cries the melody, holding it back.

Then there is the way Moravec plays with perspective as does Chopin). He gives us the aerial view in the fine twill of his background figuration, a field where the grass is flattened in great swaths by the wind and swept by the fleet shadows of clouds. And he gives us the closeup in a free-singing melody that runs through that field like wild poppies with their faces turned up to the sun. His rhetoric can surprise, too, by acknowledging that the aftershock of an expressive gesture can have more impact than the initial event. The first stress, coming as expected, is poignant enough; a second one we don't expect unseats us. There's a lot of the unexpected in Moravec. And there's no one else like him.