At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday, May 14

A big noise coming out of Russia is the pianist Denis Matsuev, a gold medal winner in the 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition who came to the Chan Centre on Saturday in his Vancouver debut.

He’s 36 and beefy and the press—especially the British press—has raved about him. “Perhaps he is the new [Vladimir] Horowitz,” supposed the London Times, while Gramophone magazine theorized a bit more modestly that he’s the new Emil Gilels. Well, I say what the hell, why not throw in the virtuoso pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, too, and I’m not being sarcastic. He even sort of looks like a young Gilels.

Whomever Matsuev reincarnates, he tailors his repertoire to his strengths. He chose a massive program at the Chan and had the muscle to pull it off. He even has the smaller muscles that take care of articulation and finesse.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that we were in for something, just watching his walk from the wings—a fast, loping gait straight to the piano with little time wasted on bows.

Everything he put on his program was big and meaty, perhaps except for Franz Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, Op. 143, D.784, a troubled, angular work written at a time when the composer was ill with the venereal disease that would soon end his life early.

That was a strange choice to begin a concert with, though it was well-played. The next piece, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, familiarly known as the “Appassionata”, gave you a much better idea of what Matsuev is about. This was a massive, full-frontal attack on a sonata that has come to symbolize Beethoven and it was taken to the wall—quite unlike Lang Lang’s flaccid performance about a month ago. Everything about it was admirable, from the whole conception down to the finger work.

Franz Liszt’s ferociously difficult Mephisto Waltz No. 1 actually invoked a momentary suspicion that maybe Matsuev had pulled off his own deal with the devil, because it was flawless.

But he saved his big statement for the end: Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, and this is a big one.

An interesting thing about Matsuev is that he was chosen by Sergei Rachmaninoff’s grandson to record some rediscovered pieces that Rachmaninoff originally sent to Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky but that were lost by Tchaikovsky’s secretary. They were eventually found, and recorded by Matsuev, who used Rachmaninoff’s Steinway at his estate in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Virtually unknown, too, because it’s so rarely played, is the above Rachmaninoff sonata, a colossally difficult piece, which explains why we almost never hear it.

The only thing wrong here was that Matsuev chose the shorter second version that Rachmaninoff came up with, thinking that the original version was too long, though that decision didn’t help its popularity.

Never mind, you got the idea anyway. This was titanic pianistry that people in the audience (not sold-out, many of them Russian) will talk about for some time. It was good to be there.