At the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, September 24. Continues September 26

The season-opening concert by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra featured locally raised pianist Jon Kimura Parker in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3—or “The Rach Three” as it was balefully identified throughout the 1996 Australian movie Shine.

It featured actor Geoffrey Rush as the purportedly great—though he was anything but—real-life Australian pianist David Helfgott. The film used a brilliant piece of music as the vehicle for a boneheaded movie that completely evoked the hyperbolic cultural clichés of 1940s Hollywood. (For some reason, music never comes off very well in these hysterical howlers.)

The movie was right about one thing—the concerto is very difficult, if not quite as difficult as the filmmakers would have you believe. I have about 10 recordings of it and most of them are just fine, though the clear winner is Vladimir Horowitz in his 1951 performance.

No one ever surpassed or even came up to his throwaway panache and impression of absolute ease, and Parker didn’t either, though it would be unreasonable to measure him against a legend.

The main problem was a long passage in the first movement in which the piano and orchestral textures were far from balanced or clear. Parker played the shorter, more silvery second of Rachmaninoff’s two cadenzas and especially came into his own with the hugely difficult third movement.

And, speaking of cultural clichés, we had that all-time champion, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, but it’s a cliché through no fault of its own. You can’t blame Tchaikovsky for the fact that it’s been done to death, which is strange in itself for such a morbid piece of music. (Even Tchaikovsky felt there was something sickening and not quite right about it, though it’s a structural marvel.) There is something almost presciently Soviet about its tenebrous brass blares and its lock-step dance with the horrors of “fate”.

That aside, it’s a glorious piece of music and the VSO played it almost to perfection. This symphony, like the Rachmaninoff, is long, but familiarity made it seem much shorter.

And for once the filler, Emil von Reznicek’s little-known overture to the comic opera Donna Diana, wasn’t a six-minute throwaway. This is delightful music that contains the sound of laughter. It came as a surprise and it was great to hear it.