Inner calm, sensitivity, fluidity, poetry, magic and even risk-taking have all been used to describe the rapt playing of 27-year-old American pianist Eric Lu.

His long, pale fingers skim over the keys, seeming barely to touch them during impossibly fleet-fingered trills, then levitate and effortlessly float down to just the right point and pressure.

Like all great musicians, Lu becomes one with the work and his instrument.

“When you’re playing, you’re in the moment,” he said. “You forget about the technique, the notes and your strategies, and the music takes over and becomes the driver.”

“And if you don’t take risks,” he continued, “you lose that extra edge, especially in an emotionally charged passage that needs a certain painful, dramatic sound with serious intensity to it. It requires a very specific kind of touch, and in certain difficult passages there might be more possibility of wrong notes. But you still play it the way you feel the music needs.”

Already being compared to Radu Lupu, the late Romanian pianist whom Lu describes as “one of the gods of piano,” the young virtuoso’s career has literally taken flight worldwide.

Immersed in classical music in a Bedford, Mass., household where his older sister was already playing piano, Lu began lessons at age 6. He took to the instrument at once and never looked back.

At 17, he attracted international attention as a prizewinner in the 2015 Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw.

After his last appearance with Grand Piano Series, at 20, he went on to take first place among 24 competitors at the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition — the first American to do so since then-25-year-old Murray Perahia in 1972.

He signed an exclusive contract with Warner Classics, won the 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and now jets around the world to appear with such renowned orchestras as the London Symphony, Boston Symphony, Shanghai Symphony and Oslo Philharmonic.

When he joined this season’s roster, series President and Artistic Director Milana Strezeva announced, “This year, we are bringing back one of our beloved crowd favorites.”

As Lu is among pianists, so Chopin is in the pantheon of piano music. All the passion and poetry of the Polish master will come alive at Lu’s hands next month, in an all-Chopin program which promises both audience and pianist the rare pleasure of total immersion in a single great composer, arguably Lu’s favorite.

“I’ve played Chopin the most in my life,” he said. “So, on a personal level, I feel very emotionally close to him.

“I haven’t done a program by one composer in a long time. It’s wonderful to have that deeper immersion in the music, because you don’t have to switch your aesthetics or technique as you do with multiple composers.”

And Lu can prove that even a single composer program needn’t be monotonous.

His showcase of Chopin’s work unveils a series of compelling contrasts between long form and short, early works and late, lyrical and passionate.

The recital’s array of mazurkas, polonaises, an exuberant ballade and a dramatic sonata includes an early, little performed polonaise, written in the composer’s teens and published posthumously; the middle-period, militaristic “Tragic” polonaise; and the later Polonaise Fantasy, whose poetic storyline of shifting aural images ends in a resoundingly difficult coda to both the piece and the first half of the concert.

After intermission and the posthumous polonaise (which most will be hearing for the first time) comes an ambitious climax: the virtuosic four-movement Sonata No. 3 in B minor, whose fiery passion even Lu admits was challenging for him to learn to perform well.

“It’s a really wonderful end to any recital,” he said. ¦

Eric Lu: The Chopiniana

· When: 7:30 p.m. May 1
· Where: Daniels Pavilion, Artis—Naples, 5833 Pelican Bay Boulevard, Naples
· Tickets: $59
· More Info: grandpianoseries.org or artisnaples.org. Call Grand Piano Series at 469-333-3231 or Artis—Naples at 239-597-1900 for questions.