Most practitioners in Carnegie Hall have the opportunity to select an instrument from nearby Steinway Hall and have it moved across the street for their performances. When Maurizio Pollini recently gave his two recitals at that storied auditorium, he had his piano shipped over from Italy.

So when Emi Kagawa began her recital at St. Paul’s Chapel on Monday by remarking, deferentially but emphatically, on her discomfort with the piano at hand, it was difficult not to feel for her. I hoped that if the concert were poor, she would not use the instrument as an excuse. As it turned out, this was one of the best performances of the entire season, and rendered moot her statement that the piano “sometimes plays what I do not.” Ms. Kagawa is a former Bachauer Competition award-winner and was a student of the great Jerome Lowenthal. She is currently a private teacher, and performs extensively in both America and Japan, and is obviously encouraged by a challenge. She selected a very difficult program for her current presentation.

Ms. Kagawa takes a long time to center herself before each movement, but is well worth the wait. She began with Mozart’s Sonata in D Major, K. 311, and served notice from the outset that she was an artist both interesting and bold. Taking the direction con spirito literally, she fashioned a lively intercourse of thematic material notable for its clarity and for technique that demonstrated her prodigious digital strength. Most welcome was the ruminative Andante con espressione, unhurried and dignified, measured and profound. The long pause after this movement seemed particularly apt.

After Mozart, Ms. Kagawa entered the territory only explored by the bravest of keyboard artists. It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful piece than Sergei Rachmaninoff’s G Major Prelude, Op. 32, No. 5 or a realization more ravishing than this one. Ms. Kagawa filled the room with gorgeous sound, and, after another interval of meditation, followed with a perfectly contrasting Rachmaninoff prelude, this time the G Sharp Minor, No. 12 from the same set. This wild ride is tremendously exciting and more than a little exotic. It was as if we were exposed to the entire spectrum of Rachmaninoff’s long compositional career in just a few moments. Technically, these renditions were superb.

Robert Schumann set out to write the Fantasy in C Major as a memorial to Beethoven, but quickly shifted gears and crafted a love letter to his beloved Clara in the guise of a de facto sonata. The climax of the coda in the middle March section is notorious as a difficult passage not for the faint of heart. Clara herself described the feeling of performing it as “feeling hot and cold at the same time.” Ms. Kagawa traversed the passage with apparent ease, although there were moments that got away from her.

Overall, this was a sensitive performance of a magnificent work, known primarily for its louder, more bombastic passages, but notable this day for the hymnlike treatment of the final movement. This ended the afternoon with a spiritual calm appropriate for a concert in a church. Ms. Kagawa quite literally throws herself into her performances, and she concluded with a flourish of chords that each time propelled her backward. This was truly exciting music making.