Listeners at Bargemusic on Friday evening might have expected a pianist named Jeffrey Swann to entertain them with selections from Lohengrin as part of his recital titled “Wagner and His Influences,” but he opted instead to feature music from Der Ring des Nibelungen, a road company version of which was opening at exactly the same moment just across the river. Mr. Swann is a lecturer as well as a performer, and the only question that remains after one of his evenings is which is the more expressive side of his polymath personality.

The water was surprisingly rough on the river this night and may have caused some uncharacteristic inaccuracies in Mr. Swann’s renditions of two of Chopin’s more chromatic mazurkas that opened the program. The recitalist quickly settled in, however, and produced much more polished versions of the remaining musical material. The first half was devoted to pieces that influenced Wagner and, in turn, music that was engendered by him. Mr. Swann made a strong case both logically and pianistically for the harmonic language of Chopin as inspiration for the later work of the operatic composer. His sensitive performance of the Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 1 was notable for its delicate strength of touch.

The most obvious mentor of Wagner among the great composers was Franz Liszt, and Mr. Swann not only spoke eloquently about their multifaceted relationship but also delivered a measured and thoughtful “Aux cypres de la Villa d’Este” from the Années de Pèlerinage. This turned out to be a warm-up for the best performance of the evening.

The triskaidekaphobe Arnold Schoenberg would have been appalled that his music was performed on Friday the 13th, but Mr. Swann quite rightly included him as the most intensely Wagnerian of all composers of the 20th century. The Five Piano Pieces, Opus 23 not only include the very first composition written in the dodecaphonic style — the concluding waltz — but also go a long way toward cleaning up some of the excess filigree that haunted the piano music of the years surrounding the Great War.

Mr. Swann’s realization was truly excellent — marred slightly but endearingly by his efforts to turn his own pages — and captured the revolutionary composer’s reliance on well established forms even as he completely reinvented harmonic language. This was what acolyte Rene Leibowitz called his “fundamental traditionalism.”

This was but an appetizer to the entrée and dessert of the second half. Here Mr. Swann demonstrated yet another talent, the skill of the transcriptionist. His own reworking of the entire Norn scene from Götterdämmerung was highly enlightening, the melodic line, now independent of the timbral emphasis of the singers, sounding in some spots totally different than in the operatic version. His segue directly into the music for Siegfried’s funeral — in a transcription penned by Ferruccio Busoni — recalled written accounts of one of the most discussed improvisations of the 19th century, when Anton Bruckner interwove this Wagner scene with themes from his own Symphony No. 8 at the organ.

The rocking of the room calmed slightly for Brangaene’s Watch from “Tristan und Isolde” in another of Mr. Swann’s transliterations. He had previously done a fine job describing the extramusical significance of this opera, placing it in both philosophical and literary contexts. His playing here was superb: colorful, deliquescent, and very moving.

As he himself stated, this was a hard act to follow, and he did so in a rousing, comic vein. Just so we wouldn’t take any of this too seriously, Mr. Swann closed the evening with an outrageous and virtually unplayable transcription of the Ride of the Valkyries by a former president of Juilliard, Ernest Hutcheson. George Szell taught us that the swirling in the strings is much more important than the insistent, repetitive melody of the brass, and Mr. Swann performed a yeoman’s job in keeping his right hand in constant motion while the left banged out the familiar tune. After listening to this professorial lecture on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it was oddly of Anna Russell that I thought on the cab ride home.