Pianist, teacher, author, and radio personality David Dubal is in the midst of delivering a series of programs at the Metropolitan Museum titled Great Composers for the Piano. Last week featured Mendelssohn and Schumann. This Wednesday it was Chopin and Liszt.

These events, like the presenter himself, are multifaceted. Mr. Dubal discussed the lives and works of the two close friends who possessed polar opposite personalities. He also illustrated his talk by playing pieces at the piano and by offering rare recordings of two pianists beloved by aficionados but virtually unknown to the general public.

Leo Sirota was a student of Ferruccio Busoni and a handpicked soloist of his teacher’s Piano Concerto in Vienna. When Mr. Dubal explored the musical expression of Chopin’s circadian rhythms, his most persuasive example was Sirota’s rendition of the F minor Etude, written when the sickly composer was all of 19. This poetic pianist weaves his musical line complete with little pauses, as if he were gasping for breath — a style of play totally foreign to even the most eloquent Chopin interpreters of our own day. Like Mahler including the rhythm of his irregular heartbeat into his Symphony No. 9, Chopin expresses his view of the world through a tuberculin perspective.

For Liszt, Mr. Dubal chose the rarely heard renditions of the Hungarian Gypsy pianist György Cziffra. Cziffra was a fascinating character whose father had been a cimbalom player. Cziffra became one of the most exotic pianists of the early post-World War II era, ending up in Paris as a sort of underground Django Reinhardt character, a superb virtuoso with the hot blood of the Danube coursing through his veins.

To illustrate one of the trademarks of the flamboyant Liszt — the sheer volume of notes in a small space — Mr. Dubal played the Cziffra recording of the Totentanz for piano and orchestra. To emphasize the poetic side, as well as Cziffra’s amazing dexterity, he chose the “Chasse-neige” (wind-driven snow) Transcendental Etude No. 12. It was as if he were sharing with us a set of recordings from another planet.

No shabby pianist himself, Mr. Dubal performed live some Chopin waltzes and mazurkas, joking at one point that he concentrated on the mazurkas because he did not have the time to practice Chopin’s more difficult pieces. Mr. Dubal has the polymath’s ability to both lecture meaningfully and perform these miniatures at the same time. He pointed out the need to understand that, at the end of the day, these short works are meant to be dances, and was especially adept at capturing just the right off-kilter phrasing of the mazurkas. If they are indeed dances, then they are on the edge of the precipice.

Mr. Dubal’s pianism also illustrated Chopin’s forward-looking chromaticism. His performance of the Mazurka in F minor, the last work that the composer ever dictated — he was too weak to write by this time — sounded as if it came from the era of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, with tonicdominant tonality just a dim memory.

There are a lot of competent pianists around, but very few accomplished talkers. Mr. Dubal is a fascinating raconteur who really delivered two entirely different lectures. When he talked of Chopin, he adopted the persona of the hypochondriac, keeping the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium in stitches as he discussed his own personal cough and his frustration with his own doctor. The composer’s severe respiratory troubles were indeed treated in the salons of Paris as if they were there primarily for the amusement of his noble patrons, one of whom reportedly remarked that Chopin, “coughed beautifully.” Hearing those gasps and wheezes in the Sirota recording was truly illuminating.

When switching to the gregarious, leonine Liszt, Mr. Dubal expanded his universe to include the greater world of politics and pianism. Author of “Evenings With Horowitz,” Mr. Dubal spun tales of larger-than-life titans, such as the great Russian pianist and his father-in-law Arturo Toscanini, whom Horowitz simply called “the law.” Toscanini almost never conducted any of the Lisztian repertoire, and Mr. Dubal disclosed that this was due to Horowitz’s dislike of the man. There were — and are — those who think of Liszt as more of a circus performer, but his canon includes so much great music that the search is well worth the effort. And if enthusiasm counts for anything, David Dubal is worth an evening of one’s time. His love for Liszt is infectious and very persuasive.