Leslie Howard sometimes seems more myth than man. He is known as a pianist with a monster technique, a superhuman technique, a technique that should be physically impossible.And on Friday night, we saw — and heard — that the myth is true. Mr. Howard really does have that kind of technique. And he is a strong musician, to boot.

Mr. Howard comes from Australia, but has spent his adult life in London. He shares the name of the British actor Leslie Howard, who died in World War II, when the Germans shot down the commercial airliner in which he was traveling. The circumstances of that flight, and that attack, are mysterious.

In any case, the pianist is known for playing absurdly hard pieces from the Romantic period. He has recorded the complete piano works of Liszt, over 97 CDs (on Hyperion).That is a staggering feat.That is a lot of notes.

And never were there more notes on a recital than we heard on Friday night. Mr. Howard’s program brought “The Romantic Russian Piano Sonata — 1848–1907.”

He began with a sonata of Tchaikovsky, who wrote three for piano. This was the final one, in G major, called a “Grande Sonate” — and very grand it is, if not musically elevated. The first movement features an ocean of chords, which Mr. Howard handled exemplarily. He played those chords into the keys, resonantly.There is a great deal of bombast in this sonata — as in the others Mr. Howard performed — but this pianist knows how to trim, or manage, bombast. He is not a wild man of the keyboard.He is a smart man of the keyboard — albeit one with a circus technique.

Incidentally, you may wonder whether Mr.Howard’s recordings are for real: Can he play all those notes, or does he rely on technological trickery? You can trust the recordings — he really can play all those notes.

And he is not all Sturm und Drang. For example, in Tchaikovsky’s second movement, he produced gently rippling waves, absolutely even, and exquisite.

After the Tchaikovsky, he played a sonata by Glazunov. Piano music by Glazunov? Who knew? Mr.Howard knew (and I might mention that he is a scholar as well as a performer).The composer of “The Seasons,” plus nine symphonies, wrote two piano sonatas, both in the year 1901. Mr. Howard played the second of them, and did so with rhapsodic power. This is not great music, no (and the same statement applies to just about all of the music on the recital). But it shows Mr. Howard off, and he shows it off.

You should have heard the blizzard of octaves with which Mr.Howard concluded this sonata.

To begin the second half of the program was a sonata by Rachmaninoff — not the famous one, No .2 in B-flat minor, but its predecessor, in D minor. This work is almost never performed, and Mr. Howard did a service just by bringing it to us. The sonata has a program, a story to tell: the Faust legend, of course, composers’ favorite.

Mr. Howard stormed through the first movement, as Rachmaninoff does. In the second movement (Lento), the pianist did some nice pedaling, resulting in a beautiful blending of tones. Through the third and final movement, he stormed again. But he also missed an unusual number of notes — unusual for Mr.Howard, that is, for his usual number is none. Also, he might have given us more dynamic variety. It wasn’t so much that his playing was too loud as that it was unrelievedly loud.

He closed his printed program with the Sonata No. 1 of Anton Rubinstein. This Rubinstein was one of the most famous musicians in all the world, in the second half of the 19th century. In fact, Artur Rubinstein, when he first started to concertize, had cards made up: “A. Rubinstein, Pianist — No Relation.”

As Mr. Howard explained in his program notes, Anton Rubinstein wrote his Sonata No. 1 in 1848 (probably), when he was 19 — and it is “of great historical interest for being almost certainly the first piano sonata written by a Russian.” The sonata shows a wonderfully gifted young man, reveling in his talent. Mr. Howard laid on both the right fingers and the right spirit.

What do you play for an encore, after a recital like this — something flashy? Mr. Howard might have been well served by playing a Bach sarabande. Instead, he played more Rubinstein, a waltz, in which he demonstrated — among other things — the art of the leap. Mr. Howard can travel a long way on the keyboard, very quickly, and very accurately.

Mannes College’s International Keyboard Festival — of which this recital was part — favors Romantic lions of the piano, old-style virtuosos. This reflects the outlook of the festival’s founder and director, Jerome Rose (who gave the opening recital on the series). I regard this as a corrective in the world of music, for the bias, generally, is toward fastidious, tidy pianists. The passionate Romantics have been sort of cut out.

The dean of all such pianists is Earl Wild, who celebrated his 90th birthday with a recital in Carnegie Hall last November. He played admirably that day. He had been scheduled to play at Mannes on Saturday night. Not feeling well, however, he had to cancel.The festival arranged a tribute program instead – which should hold us, until Earl plays again.

jnordlinger@nysun.com