Unlike the intimate sketches of fellow Frenchman Claude Debussy, the piano music of Maurice Ravel is cold, glittering and virtuosic, like fine, hard jade.

Ravel’s piano music is also extremely difficult to play. It might well become a shambles in the hands of anyone with less than formidable talent. Subscribers to Chamber Music in Napa Valley’s current series were assured they would encounter a shimmering, incandescent reading when they learned the gifted Yefim Bronfman would perform Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” on a program of musical fantasy he brought to the Napa Valley Opera House Friday night.

Wine country music lovers can consider themselves fortunate in that Bronfman regularly includes Napa Valley on his itinerary. In addition to recording works by Prokofiev, Bartók, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Ravel, to name but a few, the Grammy-winning pianist performs on a regular basis with the world's top orchestras and conductors. His performance of Shostakovich “Piano Concerto No. 2” is featured in Disney’s “Fantasia/2000.”

Friday’s appearance was his fourth this decade as part of the local subscription series. In addition to Ravel, the program included compositions — fantasies all — by Beethoven (“Sonata quasi una fantasia”), Schumann (“Fantasie in C Major”) and the Russian nationalist, Mily Balakirev (“Islamey: an Oriental Fantasy”).

Ravel composed his masterpiece “Gaspard de la Nuit” evoking the dark visions of three phantasmagorical poems. The texts by supernatural-obsessed poet Aloysius Bertrand demonstrate a fantastic and macabre imagination akin to Edgar Allen Poe, whom Ravel also admired.

The siren-song of the “Ondine” water nymph tries to lure the poet to her palace at the bottom of a lake; in “Le Gibet” we hear the slow sway of a corpse hanging on a gallows, as well as a tolling bell insistently assaulting listeners’ nerves á la Chinese water torture. The demonic gnome in “Scarbo” terrorizes the poet with his transmogrifications, changing shape, looming large and suddenly vanishing.

French musicologists maintain that with “Gaspard de la Nuit” Ravel’s style switched from white magic to black magic.

As Bronfman dispatched this eerie, icy work, one couldn’t help but realize Ravel playing doesn’t get much better than this. Combining flawless technique with poetic delicacy, Bronfman’s “Le Gibet” proved wonderfully atmospheric; “Scarbo” dazzling and sinister. Its eruptive cascades of energy and dramatic fire had us sitting on the edges of our seats.

“When Ravel wrote his ‘Gaspard de la Nuit,’ he said he wanted it to be more difficult than (Mila Balakirev’s) ‘Islamey,’ which had the reputation for being the hardest piece ever written,” noted Bronfman in describing his program selections. “And he succeeded!”

Subtitled “An Oriental Fantasy,” Balakirev’s work was written after he took a trip to the Caucasus.

It has retained its reputation as a technical war-horse for the pianist. Live performance of this work is risky for even the most hardened concert pianist, but the electrifying nature of the work renders it worthwhile for pianist and audience alike.

With the guest artist exhibiting flawless technique and perfect control, the dazzling pyrotechnics of this virtuosic work brought the concert to a rousing conclusion, complete with well-deserved standing ovation.

But that was only the second half of the program. Bronfman had already charmed the full house with outstanding readings of the Beethoven and Schumann fantasies.

Beethoven avoided beginning the first movements with sonata form in the two sonatas that make up Opus 27 — “No. 1 in E-flat major” and “No. 2 in C-sharp minor.” Undoubtedly, for this reason, he justified this treatment by adding “Quasi una fantasia” to the sonata title for the first of these works. The second one is also known as “Moonlight” sonata. The first movements of these two sonatas are more like character pieces. Bronfman presented “Sonata quasi una fantasia” with simplicity and the utmost eloquence.

Schumann’s “Fantasia in C Major” was written at a despairing moment in the composer’s difficult courtship of his great love, Clara Wieck — when her father forbade the couple to communicate. Renowned for its difficulty, the “Fantasia” contains some of the most exalted love music ever written. Schumann later wrote to Clara: “You will only be able to understand the ‘Fantasia’ if you recall the unhappy summer of 1836 when I had to give you up.”

Here was a virtuoso performance by a serious artist. Bronfman’s playing throughout the piece had a command on one hand and deep poetic feeling on the other that held the audience spellbound. His romantic reading of the first two movements was matched by the depth of poetic feeling and passion he found in the finale.

As if he hadn’t sufficiently dazzled us with one of the most difficult piano programs ever offered here, Bronfman served up not one but three encores — a romance and an intermezzo from Schumann and, with effortless virtuosity, an exhilarating, keyboard-punishing performance of the final movement of Prokofiev’s “Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat.” Whew!