One of the pleasures of playing Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, says Inon Barnatan, is that it allows the soloist considerable interpretive freedom—but the Israeli-born virtuoso quickly backtracks, adding that he doesn’t intend to ape his fellow pianist Glenn Gould in taking liberties with the composer’s intent.

“Have you ever heard this fascinating speech that Leonard Bernstein gave before a performance of the concerto with Glenn Gould?” he asks the Straight from his Manhattan loft. “Before Gould comes on-stage, Bernstein gives a little disclaimer to the audience, basically saying that normally a conductor and a soloist can come to a kind of an agreement about interpretation. In this case, though, the discrepancies were so great that, even though he wasn’t cancelling or making a fuss, he still felt like Gould’s approach was far enough from his own interpretation to warrant a speech.”

It’s unlikely that Barnatan and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director Bramwell Tovey will have a similar tussle over how to play the concerto, which is the centrepiece of a VSO season-opener that also includes Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Ottawa composer Kelly Marie Murphy’s A Thousand Natural Shocks. Yet it’s also probable that their interpretation of the piece will differ from any you’ve ever heard before, as Barnatan says he’s never performed it the same way twice.

“Part of the process of living with a piece is that it changes from performance to performance, from orchestra to orchestra, and from piano to piano,” the 35-year-old musician notes. “It’s a living thing, and I’ve played it at different tempi depending on what felt right at the time. I have more or less an idea of what I want to do, of course, but that can change according to the position.”

Barnatan adds, perhaps counterintuitively, that his love of contemporary music is one of the tools that he uses to keep works such as Brahms’s 1858 masterpiece sounding fresh.

“One of our challenges is to think, even with the Brahms concerto, as if it was written yesterday,” he says. “It shouldn’t feel like this staid old classic that you’ve heard many, many times before and you’re going to hear yet again. When an actor is trying to speak the role of Hamlet, for example, it shouldn’t feel like ‘Oh, we all know the words.’ It should feel like he is Hamlet, and he’s thinking about those lines at that very moment. I feel the same thing. Being with music that’s written now, and realizing what it is to perform something that is new and kind of grows out of now, sharpens also the way we listen to music from before.

“I think it’s the same with any art form,” he continues. “Looking at contemporary art sharpens the way you look at older art—how you look at shapes, how you look at colour. I’m very curious about that, and I think that performing a new piece also makes the innovation in an old piece stand out—and vice versa. If you choose the right pieces and play them in the right combination, it just makes everything sound interconnected. It’s a fascinating and beautiful process.”

There’s one other thing that Barnatan takes into consideration when performing the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, which is that Brahms wasn’t always Brahms—or at least not the big-bearded, big-bellied patriarch that he became in later life. “There’s a kind of richness to Brahms,” he says of the concerto, written when the composer was just 25. “But this piece can’t be too heavy, otherwise it dies a little bit. It’s a young man’s piece.”

Inon Barnatan joins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum on Saturday and Monday (September 27 and 29).