As far as on-the-job perks go, the anonymous woman who answers the phone at the Theme & Variations music store in Sydney, Australia, has it pretty good. In the background, someone is playing piano with unerring precision, and the clerk quickly confirms that it’s Sydney resident Alexander Gavrylyuk at the keys. “It’s lovely when he comes in and plays around on our Steinways,” she says. “We’re delighted to have him here.”

Chances are that Vancouver audiences will be equally delighted when the Ukrainian-born musician returns to the Orpheum this week. We won’t get quite such an intimate encounter: he’ll be on-stage with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, playing all four of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, as well as the Russian composer’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. It’s universally agreed that Gavrylyuk is among the world’s finest interpreters of this music, however, and recent developments in his home country haven’t changed his love for Rachmaninoff’s scores.

“I find that music will always stand above political events, and personal feelings towards another culture should not interfere in the perception of music coming from that culture,” the pianist explains in thickly accented but accurate English, once he’s pried himself away from practising. “I must say that I was brought up surrounded by Russian art, in a broad sense, and to this day I admire and respect those great composers, artist, painters, and writers. One can agree or disagree with the current events in Ukraine, which are very tragic, because there are so many ties between Ukrainians and Russians. It’s very tragic to see what is happening at the moment, although I am very convinced that the only right way to go for Ukrainians is to look towards a brighter, democratic future.…So I applaud people for standing up for that, and I only pray that this situation doesn’t escalate into worse conflict.”

Rachmaninoff himself was no stranger to turmoil, both personal and political. Although his first concerto was written in the pastoral setting of his aristocratic family’s country home, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor emerged from an extended period of depression brought on by the failure of his first symphony, and the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor was written in the United States, to which he’d fled following the Soviet revolution. It seems timely that music director Bramwell Tovey has chosen Rachmaninoff’s music as the focus of the VSO’s inaugural Spring Festival, and Gavrylyuk concurs, adding that hearing the four concertos and the Rhapsody in chronological order is the perfect way to understand their composer’s musical and personal development.

As for his own musical growth, the 30-year-old Gavrylyuk says that’s an ongoing process. “At the moment, I am trying my hardest to find sincerity and artistic truth in every performance,” he says. “I’m trying to simply dissolve into every piece I play, and to find the essence of the music.”

It’s “a delicate process”, the pianist concedes. But when it comes to Rachmaninoff’s music he has an excellent guide: the composer himself recorded the concertos before his death in 1943, and those archival albums now serve as Gavrylyuk’s template.

“It is very important for me to keep in mind that Rachmaninoff never liked melancholy, or any kind of exaggeration in his phrasing,” he says. “So staying sincere and always thinking about the bigger picture, that’s the big lesson for me that I get from his recordings—and perhaps simplicity, in the good sense.”

Simplicity isn’t a quality often associated with Rachmaninoff, but when it comes to articulating the music’s emotional core, Gavrylyuk’s selfless intensity should more than suffice.