With the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. At the Orpheum Theatre on Sunday, March 7. Continues March 8

Just one question about soloist Janina Fialkowska’s appearance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra: though she’s a fine pianist and a supreme interpreter of the music of Frédéric Chopin, why put both of his piano concertos on one program?

Of course, this year is Chopin’s 200th birthday, so you’d expect something special, but aren’t there other ways of doing it?

Aside from giving the feeling of too much Chopin in one medium, neither concerto gives the orchestra a lot to do—the scoring is very thin for everyone but the pianist. If we had to have this much Chopin, it would have been more interesting to hear one concerto (Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21, please) and some unusual, not overplayed, Chopin—say, the Krakowiak or the Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante or another one of his solo pieces, even if a solo would have given the orchestra less to do. But never mind.

A confusion in the order of their publishing puts Chopin’s actual first concerto, F Minor, as his second and his second concerto, E Minor. Op. 11, as his first. The F Minor is the better one, being considerably shorter and having the buoyancy and freshness that the other doesn’t live up to.

Fialkowska, who studied under one of history’s most perceptive Chopin musicians, Arthur Rubinstein, played magically. Many players exaggerate Chopin’s rubato, that little theft of time so important to his music, but Fialkowska didn’t. She made the music sound as natural as it should be, evoking the playing of the excellent pianist Dang Thai Son.

Fialkowska’s interpretation had the coruscations we expect of Chopin’s highly decorative writing, a real sense of elegance, and in the languid slow movements, a feeling of the operatic composer Chopin so revered, Vincenzo Bellini.

It was a lot of Chopin, but it wasn’t all Chopin: there were two other pieces on the program. The first was Franz Liszt’s St. Francis of Assisi: The Sermon to the Birds, which was originally written for piano but loses its individuality in Liszt’s own orchestral transcription. The other was Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, with its memorable tune for English horn which was played to a turn by Beth Orson. The fact that they were contemporaneous with Chopin’s sound-world saved their addition from anticlimax.