Sean Chen plays piano to great acclaim, but much of his inspiration comes from orchestras and the carefully blended music of multiple performers.

"I really like listening to orchestral music, so I’m always kind of influenced in that way," said Chen, who will perform a solo concert Thursday at Orvis Auditorium at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "So much good music was written for orchestra and chamber music, and at this point I’ve pretty much listened to pretty much all I wanted to in terms of standard piano repertoire, and so it’s always nice to discover things that I haven’t heard before."

That influence has trickled into his piano performance in a way that has critics raving about his nuanced, sensitive interpretations, as well as his formidable technique.

"He played the piano like a wind instrument, as if breathing into it to create sounds. It was uncanny," wrote critic Chantal Incandela on nuvo.net, while the New York Times’ Vivien Schweitzer praised his "alluring, colorfully shaded renditions" in his recording of Scriabin and Ravel.

The 26-year-old Chen grew up in Los Angeles, a product of the computer generation who played video games as much as he played the piano. Along with his own compositions, he’s transcribed video game music for piano.

"I still play, not as much, but I used to play a lot growing up. I played ‘(The Legend of) Zelda,’ ‘Final Fantasy,’" he said. "It was more the adventure and role-playing games that I really enjoyed. They’re kind of more at your own pace, more graphics and story-oriented and music-oriented, and less competitive, because piano is already competitive enough."

Competition is where he’s really proved his mettle.

Chen was the Crystal Award winner, representing third place, in the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, becoming the first American-born pianist to place since 1997. (Jon Nakamatsu, a frequent visitor to Hawaii, won that year.) Chen also won competitions as a student at Juilliard and in Cleveland in 2009, and placed second at a 2011 competition in Seoul. He was a semifinalist in the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2012 in the U.K., a competition with a long track record of picking noted artists, and he was third in one in Morocco in 2013.

For his performance here, Chen will explore the etude, or study, via the composers Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartok and Rachmaninoff, concluding with Ligeti’s famous "Etude No. 13: L’escalier du diable (The Devil’s Staircase)." Much of this is not standard concert fare, but if it’s challenging to listeners, Chen has a thoughtful way to explain it.

"There’s kind of a two-level trajectory for it," he said. "There’s the chronological sequence — it’s almost all correct chronologically — so you have kind of a ‘history of the development of etudes’ narrative, as well as they’re structured in pairs, and each pair deals with similar technical or thematic issues.

"The Scriabin, the Bartok, the Rachmaninoff and the Ligeti, they’re pretty modern — sounding at least — and by themselves, people can have adverse reactions to complex music like that. But when you put them into a narrative, and explain that to the audience, it suddenly becomes very easily digested and understood by the audience, even if they don’t know anything about etudes."

He’ll also put his painterly, colorful and virtuosic inclinations on display in two movements from "Goyescas," the "very Spanish, very evocative" works by Enrique Granados that were inspired by paintings of Goya, and Liszt’s monumental transcription of Wagner’s "Overture to Tannhauser."