Stepping out in a tight navy suit, Charles Owen’s muscular figure preluded a tenacious performance at Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard. He is ruddy and compact, softly spoken in slick introductions across the second half, while Schubert’s Impromptu in C Minor and Wanderer Fantasie spoke for themselves with hardly a pause in between. I sat on the back row, desiring to observe his manner during the pre-concert introduction by his host. He entered stolid, fingering the cuff of his wrist in a secret emission of memory layered atop memory. Seated at the piano, his profile ebbed into view between the backs of audience members, with a flexibility which jarred against his robust physique. The drama of this image alone did not feel out of place, surrounded by the gallery’s collection.

In the Impromptu, Owen embraced indeterminacy, bestowing distinct personalities to the piano’s registers. Exploring a rumbling lower register, piece’s exposition seemed deliberately effortful, breaking through duller clouds with more refined upper-register renditions of the serpentine subject. In lower octaves, his sound was broad rather than plummy, with a softer attack. I initially found this terraced approach unattractive, especially where clarity of the lower register was lost. Moving into Wanderer Fantasie, however, saw a shift to steelier baritones and basses in more equitable conversation with the upper register. It was in this context that the character of his Impromptu was explainable as a conscious choice, rather than a struggle against a reluctant instrument. Perhaps the pacing of Wanderer Fantasie across its four movements called for this tactful slimming of voices, as in the wonderous Adagio; heaviness returned as Owen pumped towards the piece’s conclusion.

The Schubert was tactfully emotionally staid, with well-timed moments of tenderness. Heavier pedalling in Impromptu blurred melodic lines, enriching the harmonic language by lingering across boundaries. Its beauty existed between margins. Marshalling the Impromptu along a rigid meter, Owen gave way to surprising durations of rubato mid-phrase which teetered the edge of flexibility and snapping. In Emma-Ruth Richard’s Etude No. 1: Escape, Owen likewise allowed the music to breathe amidst very involved playing. Here, his balance of indeterminacy and embodied clarity was on superb display, taking lines either to brilliant clarity or cooling their individuality. Rooted in a magical logic belying the seemingly chance fluttering, Owen embodied the piece’s subject – British birds’ flight-paths – as the immaculate artist painting individual starlings into existence, while himself, soaring.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Stones of the Sky crystalised what I had come to realise was Owen’s extensive tonal range. In this highly visual composition, refracted sunlight beams in technicolour from the lattices of individual stones onto great monoliths and marble slabs. Frances-Hoad’s writing evokes the sensuality of Pablo Neruda’s poetry (of the same name), darting between cliffs and nadirs, doves in flight, daughters in love and barnacled lapis lazuli. Owen’s was a glorious presentation, with luminous slights of hand and glittering slabs of cluster chords cascading through the acoustic.

Closing with the miniatures of Schumann’s Carnaval, Owen reverted to his earlier forceful mode. There were moments of light, as in Pappillons and Pause, though other items were a little shaded. A bracing Marche des Davidsbünder contre les Philistins brutishly pushed through fogginess, causing the instrument’s body to audibly shake. As one of his family members remarked to me, he might have considered removing his tight jacket in the room’s heat. Perspiration was certainly of his own making, not Schumann’s.