When Ilya Itin made his debut at the Miami International Piano Festival in 2000, it was immediately evident that the top prize winner of the 1996 Leeds International Piano Competition had an imposing keyboard technique.

A prominent presence at the festival for many years afterward, Itin returned Sunday afternoon for the festival’s Aventura series and displayed a more subtle side of his artistry. To be sure, he can still storm the pianistic barricades with power-pounding bravura. Yet that virtuosity has been seasoned with a wide palette of coloration, attention to minute detail and sensitivity of touch.

For his program at the Aventura Art and Culture Center, Itin presented a plethora of preludes by Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, two composers who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries. While Rachmaninoff remained firmly ensconced in the idiom of the romantic era, Scriabin was harmonically bold and adventurous, even at the earliest stages of his career.

Itin’s mature approach to this repertoire was evident in his reading of the most familiar work on the concert, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude No. 2 in C-sharp minor, Op.3 Instead of bombast, he brought subtlety and expansive phrasing to the oft-performed vignette.

The first half of Itin’s program was devoted to Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11. Some of these pieces are barely a minute long. While the composer was clearly under the spell of Tchaikovsky, his originality is present in embryonic form at this early stage. There is dissonant modernity in the Prelude No. 4 in E minor. The grandiose imperial aura of the final D minor work seems to put an exclamation point on one of the most furtive eras of artistic creativity. Itin’s delicately hued version of the Prelude in C Major immediately established his command of this literature. Runs and trills were executed with pinpoint accuracy. His beauty of tonal production and ability to turn on a dime from Russian angst to balletic lightness and an almost orchestral sonority enlivened the cycle.

The concert’s second half encompassed ten Preludes from Ops. 23 and 32 by Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff had a dual career as a busy concert pianist throughout his life and he continued to perform these pieces. That performing side is obvious in the preludes’ technical demands.

Itin has long been a fine Rachmaninoff pianist but ihe s now even more persuasive in this repertoire, fully capturing the pensive and ruminative sides of the composer. His performances were marked by clarity of inner lines. In the Prelude in F-sharp minor, Op. 23, no.1, the agitated figures in the left hand were insistently conveyed against the melodic pattern in the right. The ominous martial tone of the D minor prelude, Op. 23, no. 3 emerged strong and decisive. In the concluding  D-flat Major, Op. 32, no. 13 piece, he seemed to draw together all the facets of Rachmaninoff’s compositional tool box—the blazing impetuousness and lyrical reflection alike.

The audience would not let Itin go without encores. After repeatedly returning to the stage, he sat back down at the Steinway for exquisitely etched readings of the Preludes in G-sharp minor and G Major, Op. 32, concluding the unique program on a poetic note.

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