With two encores, Yuja Wang blew the roof off Verizon Hall Tuesday night

It doesn’t take much for Yuja Wang to draw in listeners and make all earthly objects around her disappear. That she could nearly fill Verizon Hall Tuesday night meant that she had a rapt audience before even playing a note.

But it was a particularly savvy move for the Philadelphia-trained, internationally adored pianist to open her solo recital with Olivier Messiaen. The name is unknown to most casual concertgoers, and by saving Chopin and other favorites for later in the program, Wang laid down a kind of challenge: Trust me on this, she seemed to say, and grow as a listener.

It’s always a mystery what people take away from a concert — the audience’s mindless coughing during this often-delicate music wasn’t a great sign — but Messiaen’s Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus should have stopped everyone in their tracks. This is not just wonderfully mystical music, but it also perfectly aligned with what many of Wang’s fans come to her for: daring and edge.

The two movements she chose, “The kiss of the infant Jesus” and “Contemplation of the joyful spirit,” couldn’t be more different, but they’re both distinct expressions of spiritual ecstasy. Pianistically speaking, that means virtuosity, which is Wang’s natural province. The distinct colors she found for Messiaen’s lullaby-ish floating and flight-of-fancy right-hand bird evocations in the first movement were just right. And, in the second, she proved that savage and joyous are not mutually exclusive moods.

Oddly, Wang wasn’t as sensitive a colorist in Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse, where she pounded the keyboard more percussively than this music should have to bear.

Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 8 comes in heaves — like a lot of Scriabin — which, combined with the flattening of the harmonic landscape, can make this piece seem otherworldly and aimless. Wang kept the otherworldly mystery of the work, while unfurling the drama with a great sense of direction and purpose.

It was a similar sensibility that made her Chopin so gripping. There was nothing predictable in the lilt she gave to the pulsing rhythm of the Ballade No. 2 in F Major (yes, she reshuffled the order of works from what was listed in the printed program). The flexible approach to tempo was within certain bounds, yet small moves had a profound effect on emotion. The sad waltz in the Ballade No. 4 in F Minor might never have been rendered with such poignancy or peril, and the mountain of sound to which Wang built was almost suffocating in its intensity.

The two encores were each cool and hot, both in transcriptions by the pianist herself. Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2 wanted for the percussion of the original orchestral version made popular by conductor Gustavo Dudamel, though Wang’s long crescendo-accelerando was beautifully paced. And her “Scherzo” from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 made you understand why Vladimir Horowitz is one of her idols. To capture the entirety of an orchestra in her two hands the way she did, made “Flight of the Bumblebee” seem like child’s play. The runs and glissandos were impressive, but more importantly, she perfectly captured sparkle and euphoria — the essential elements of both the piece and the performer.

Next concert in the Kimmel Center’s Spotlight Series: pianist Evgeny Kissin, May 15 at 8 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Sts. Tickets are $51-$136. philorch.org, 215-893-1999.