Stewart Goodyear has won acclaim for playing some of the world’s most revered music, including Ludwig van Beethoven’s complete cycle of 32 piano sonatas—which he’s recorded for the Marquis Music label—and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But the piece that might be closest to his heart just happens to be the one he’ll perform with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra as part of this year’s Spring Festival: George Gershwin’s Concerto in F.

“I first heard Gershwin’s Concerto in F when I was four years old,” the piano virtuoso reveals in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he’s visiting his mother. “And I was first introduced to Gershwin because of this LP collection, The Gershwin Album, which had the Concerto in F, Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess, in [Robert Russell] Bennett’s arrangement for orchestra. I was really captivated, and I just knew it was going to be my favourite concerto, not only to listen to but to learn and to perform.”

Nothing in the subsequent 37 years—not even writing his own piano concerto, Callaloo, which he recently performed with the Victoria Symphony—has changed his mind. If anything, time has only deepened Goodyear’s love of the Concerto in F, and of Gershwin’s ability to invoke both his era and the places he knew best.

Those would be Paris, where both the composer Maurice Ravel and the famed composition teacher Nadia Boulanger refused to take him on as a student for fear of spoiling his already mature and distinctive style, and New York City, where he’d been born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz in 1898. But there’s another locale that played a role in shaping Gershwin’s musical approach: Russia. Although he never set foot in his parents’ native land, both Goodyear and VSO music director Otto Tausk think the connection is clear—and in Saturday’s program, From Russia With Jazz, the Concerto in F will be played alongside Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden: Dance of the Buffoons and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E Minor.

“Gershwin’s pianism is very much inspired by the Russian school,” Goodyear contends. “Even the beginning of the Concerto in F, the crescendo is very much like a Tchaikovsky or a Rachmaninoff crescendo, with the buildup of the brass and then the octaves in the strings. As a composer, I just love how Gershwin arrives at these colours with his orchestration. And because of Gershwin’s being a gifted creator of melodies, like Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov, I see all three of them as very willing to share a program together.

“Artists are always responding to their environment, and whatever they compose, I think that, instinc­tively or not, they always transcend that inspiration to create work that is timeless,” he continues. “The Rachmaninoff second symphony is a product of that, and the Gershwin Concerto in F is a product of that.”

This might explain why Gershwin’s work, written in New York City in 1925, so appealed to a four-year-old in Toronto in 1982. But there’s another connection: Goodyear, like Gershwin, is the son of immigrants to the New World, his father being English and his mother Trinidadian. Gershwin invented a sonic universe in which European and African-American styles could happily coexist, and that's exactly the environment that Goodyear enjoyed as a young musician.

“Being a child of Toronto, I come from a multicultural background, listening to multicultural music, and there were never walls,” the pianist explains. “There was just a love of music and a love of people, with those two being the exact same thing.”

Stewart Goodyear joins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in From Russia With Jazz at the Orpheum on Saturday (April 6).