Recent keyboard works presented in full color

To close its first season without its late founder, Leonard Stein, Piano Spheres turned to a guest soloist, Thomas Schultz, on Tuesday night at Zipper Concert Hall. A onetime student of Stein now on the faculty of Stanford University, and a champion of new and recent piano music, Schultz was a good fit for this enterprising series.

He cuts a tall, imposing figure, and although he can fire the big technical guns at will, he seemed to be most interested in color, in exploiting the massive range of the Fazioli piano in a sympathetic hall. These qualities were immediately put on display in a strikingly characterized performance of the revised version of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck IX. Some notes exploded and were held within an inch of their lives. The upper treble glittered like icicles. Ghostly harmonics emerged in the distance.

Schultz also has a feeling for symmetry in programming; having opened the concert with Stockhausen’s hammering chords, he closed it with Frederic Rzewski’s Piano Piece No. 4, which has an uncannily similar repetitive introduction. He captured the unrelenting driving elements of Rzewski’s piece but also produced a variety of colors -- particularly the growling bass resonances -- that went beyond even the composer’s own virtuosic performance on record.

Sandwiched between the relatively new came the very new: a trio of works written for Schultz within the last six years. In two of them, Christian Wolff’s “Touch” (2002) and Korean-born Hyo-shin Na’s “Walking, Walking” (2003), there seemed to be an underlying motif -- the sensation of walking. Not power walking for exercise but just ambling along, having no particular place to go, halting suddenly with no preparation. Na’s “Rain Study” (1999), by contrast, is a series of rivulets of piano sound.

None of these three pieces came off as anything special; they tended to drift on and on at the risk of tedium. But they did provide testimony to the curiosity and exploratory bent of this fine pianist.