On Thursday at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival, Jeffrey Swann presented “Music Inspired by Visions of Nature.” Mr. Swann, who in recent months has been active in New York playing Beethoven and Liszt, likes to preface his performances with spoken remarks, and his thematically oriented program gave him ample opportunity.

Mr. Swann had occasion to differentiate between composers who express feelings about nature (Schumann) and those who imitate its sounds (Messiaen), between Impressionists who base their music on sensual impressions (Debussy) and Expressionists who portray a hypothetical nature conceived in their own minds (Bartok).

Still, when all was said and done, I wondered whether Schumann’s approach in his “Waldszenen” (“Forest Scenes”), Op. 82, was much different from Bartok’s in his “Out of Doors” suite, since so often the sound of the music has no relationship to the natural phenomenon invoked. What do “lonely flowers” sound like? Schumann couldn’t have known any better than we do, but he applied the title to a piece with melodies of flowing eighth-notes that intersect in gentle counterpoint.

This is one of the nine pieces of the unassuming “Waldszenen,” a rarely heard work that was a pleasure to encounter. How poised Schumann is in these miniatures, compared to the turbulence other subjects inspired in him. Mr. Swann caught the mystery of “Verrufene Stelle” (“Place With a Bad Reputation”) and the best known of the set, “Vogel als Prophet” (“Prophet Bird”). He also captured the Lied-like beauty of “Abschied” (“Farewell”).

A Liszt set included the legend “St. Francis of Assisi’s Sermon of the Birds,” amusing in its pictorial content but hardly as satisfying as two works with watery subjects, the almost Schubertian “Au bord d’une source” (“Beside a Stream”) and “Les jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este” (“Fountains at the Villa d’Este”), whose sprays and torrents point the way to Impressionism. Mr. Swann made this point eloquently, following up the Liszt with four Debussy preludes, including the arrestingly evocative “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune” (“Terrace of Assignations in the Moonlight”) and “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest” (“What the West Wind Saw”), whose ominous eruptions portend stormy times.

Messiaen’s “Le merle blue” (which translates as “The Blue Blackbird,” but which Mr. Swann said was simply a kind of thrush) tries both to recreate both the bird’s characteristic warbling and evoke its habitat. If it was often hard to determine which was which amid Messiaen’s highly virtuosic treatment, presumably the contrast in pianist registers supplies a clue.

Bartok’s “Out of Doors” brought the discourse back to Schumann, in a sense, although the subject is broader than simply the forest. Indeed, Bartok gave himself a leg up in the search for musical ideas by touching on musical subjects; hence the bagpipe drone of “Musettes” and the lilting rhythm of “Barcarolla.” The frantic “Chase,” which concludes the piece, is no amiable representation of the hunt in rollicking 6/8, but was furiously dispatched by Mr. Swann a brutal, life-and-death struggle.

Both in his playing and in his remarks, Mr. Swann created an environment that encouraged the audience to think about how music is used. Normally we listen to such pieces as simply abstract works while acknowledging some extra musical component. Here even his own virtuosity, which is considerable, was enlisted in the service of description. His playing was remarkably consistent and adept in conforming to the stylistic shifts his offerings demanded.

Still, it was refreshing that the single encore, Liszt’s transcription of the overture to Wagner’s “Tannhauser,” had nothing to do with nature. I felt more of the usual dynamic between soloist and listener, as Mr. Swann dealt with the mounting technical challenges of this potpourri of tunes from opera. It proved to be ironic when the simple tune of the Pilgrims’ Chorus, which Mr. Swann played so eloquently at the start, turned out to be the source of the piece’s most furious virtuosity at the close. This was virtuosity for its own sake, and both performer and audience reveled in it.