Playing Franz Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes” is no picnic.

The virtuosity needed for the polyphonic music calls for rapid rise in octaves, daring leaps and dexterity, usually of the left hand. It’s a great workout for an ambitious pianist — like Franz Liszt.

Recognized as the greatest virtuoso of his day, Liszt was the first pianist ever to give a recital by himself.

“I would like to steal from Liszt the secret of how he plays my Etudes,” groused Frederic Chopin. What many pianists worried about performing properly, Liszt played at sight.

He invented the virtuoso pianist and all that went with it — 100 candles lighting an elegant salon; comely, white-shouldered but predatory countesses panting away; and the consummate artist crouched at the piano, dazzling one and all with his poetic profile and hypnotic eye, tossing his long flowing hair back over his forehead as he churned out a storm of lightning arpeggios and thunderous chords.

At midday Thursday, a sparse Napa Valley Opera House crowd was treated to a modern-day virtuoso, pianist Christopher Taylor, tackling Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes,” one of the most difficult works in the repertoire.

Emotional, dramatic and intense, these unashamedly virtuosic character pieces for the concert hall were written when the composer was only 15. Liszt revised them twice, mainly to make them easier for others to play.

As the folks at Festival del Sole pointed out, Taylor is an artist who often performs compositions others are afraid to tackle. At last year’s festival, he breezed through Olivier Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus” like it was pops pap.

For his Thursday performance at the Opera House, Taylor showed astonishing flair and technical assurance. Yet in the demanding fifth etude, he played with the utmost delicacy. “Will-o-the-Wisps” only occasionally rises above piano in its dynamic level, using insanely ornamented rhythmic figuration and chromatic runs to evoke an eerie atmosphere. As we suspected, Taylor was up to the challenge and then some.

The fourth study, “Mazeppa,” relates the tale of a Polish cossack whose enemies bound him to the back of a horse in order to punish him for an errant amorous tryst, then set the horse stampeding across the Ukrainian steppes — a narrative mirrored in the work’s accelerating tempo. An additional bass line gives the impression of three-handed playing. This was Taylor at his best, achieving what seems impossible.

As beads of sweat bounced off his forehead, Taylor conjured up the composer’s inner voices, dazzling us with the “Wild Hunt,” a study in rhythm, as well as “Remembrance,” whose main theme is simply Chopinesque. The final study, “Blizzard,” evoked such a somber atmosphere that we could almost sense the panic of being lost in driving snow.

It goes without saying that Taylor’s performance was impressive, the technical dexterity astonishing.

As if that wasn’t enough, the pianist returned following intermission to perform Beethoven’s final piano concerto, “No 32 in C Minor (Op. 111).”

Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by having San Francisco-based Garrick Ohlsson perform Beethoven sonatas for the Chamber Music in Napa Valley series. Personally, I like Ohlsson’s approach.

To this listener, it seemed, at first, that Taylor was approaching Beethoven with Lisztian furor.

A little heavy-handed at first, Taylor did bring depth and spontaneity to the Arietta, and the third variation with its jazzy sound.

However, one could not ignore the gravitas of this reading. Taylor is a strong performer, one of the major artists on the concert circuit today. Let’s hope that Festival del Sole includes him on its program every year.