This Sunday at the Aventura Arts and Cultural Center, the Italian pianist Francesco Libetta presents a program of core Romantic repertoire as part of the Miami International Piano Festival. Libetta’s made a number of well-received programs hereabouts, and the program he’s planning for Sunday contains solid-gold pieces, such as a number of Chopin etudes (all from Op. 10), the Schumann “Fantasy” (Op. 17) and selections from Liszt’s wide-ranging “Annees de Pelerinage,” as well as two of his well-known “Legends.”

But Libetta also has programmed something quite unusual: the first movement of the Grand Sonata, Op. 33 (“The Four Ages”), by the eccentric French pianist and composer Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888). Libetta gives a hair-raising account of this movement here, which is titled “20 Years Old” and apparently describes all the impetuousness and energy of youth.

Alkan was by many accounts an odd bird, a man who made a tremendous impression in Parisian concert life in the 1830s and 1840s, but retired after 1848 to live in seclusion, sitting at home and cranking out gigantically long piano pieces of staggering difficulty. The reason usually given is that he was passed over for a piano professor’s post at the Paris Conservatoire, and that, as a very sensitive man, he felt it better to withdraw.

There’s also the story told about his death in 1888. He was from a prominent Jewish family, and study of the Talmud and other sacred texts was one of his great avocations. The story was often told that in reaching for a book on the top shelf of a bookcase, he tipped the case over, which came down on him and killed him. Apparently that’s not true, though it also appears that he had been ill and was discovered after a fall and died shortly thereafter.

What remains is the music, which is fascinating stuff, often sparkling and exciting. It reminds one of Chopin certainly, though without the Polish composer’s melodic distinction. But it often has a sense of harmonies about to collapse as they’re spun out of the player’s hands.

What I like in particular about Libetta’s programming of the Alkan is that it gives us a much broader picture of the musical world at the time the Romantic movement was in full flower. There were many more composers creating at the time whose work has not survived, and without making some effort to hear it, you don’t get as full a view of what the musical scene, and by extension the society, was like.

Alkan is not exactly forgotten, but he’s on the fringes of the repertory, and beloved of pianists who want something a little different to play that has the power to knock and audience off its feat. Surely Libetta will be able to do that Sunday with the Alkan, and it might be the most talked-about piece on the program when the audience heads for home.

The concert is set for 4 p.m. Sunday at the Aventura center, and tickets are $30. The tickets also are available through the Broward Center for the Performing Arts at 954-462-0222.