It’s taken a lot of effort for Benjamin Grosvenor to get to where he is today, and we’re not speaking figuratively.

When the Georgia Straight reaches the British pianist, he’s comfortably ensconced in a Saint Paul, Minnesota, hotel, but only after an arduous journey through the coldest winter in East Coast memory. Flights have been delayed or cancelled, trains have been idled by snow, and highways have been icy, Grosvenor reports, although things began balmily enough.

“I started my tour in Puerto Rico, which was a bit of a tease, really,” he says with a laugh, sounding considerably relieved when informed that it’s cherry-blossom time on the West Coast. Given the unexpected rigours of his February schedule, becoming one of the world’s top concert pianists at the tender age of 22 must now seem a comparatively easy undertaking, especially as Grosvenor comes from a musical family and has benefited from first-rate training. But excellent pianists are common. What distinguishes Grosvenor from his peers is his ability to construct a concert program, something he displayed during a previous visit to Vancouver.

That program waltzed its way from the works of Johann Sebastian Bach through to those of the second Johann Strauss. The Vancouver Recital Society show he’ll present at the Playhouse this Friday doesn’t feature a similarly extended arc, but it’s not without its own internal logic.

“The first part was built around [César] Franck’s Prélude, Chorale and Fugue, which I’ve wanted to play for a number of years,” the young musician explains. “I had an idea of constructing a baroque-inspired first half, where we get from [Jean-Philippe] Rameau, from pure baroque, to [Ferruccio] Busoni’s reimagining of the Bach Chaconne in D Minor, a 19th-century take on a famous baroque piece, and then the Franck, which is this really individual and great work of 19th-century neobaroque. So that’s the sort of narrative in the first half; the Rameau acts as a kind of palate-cleanser between the Busoni and the Franck, which are two very dark works.

“And then, in the second half, we go somewhere different, when we have [Frédéric] Chopin and [Enrique] Granados,” he continues. “I suppose they’re comparatively a little more optimistic. They’re two composers who are united by their Romantic piano style; they’re both very gifted melodists, and both very nationalistic composers. I mean, Chopin’s music is very Polish—we have mazurkas there—and Granados’s music just brims with the music of Spain. I’ve always been attracted to the Spanish idiom, so I’m really looking forward to getting into Goyescas, which is Granados’s greatest work.”

The most modern composition in the program dates from 1911, but Grosvenor’s performance still holds the possibility of surprise, especially for those unfamiliar with Busoni’s transcription of Bach.

“You wouldn’t think that it could be a piece for solo violin,” he explains. “In the piano transcription, you have this quiet D-major theme, and then he says, ‘Like trombones.’ At no time, I think, does he have the sonority of a violin in his head, but really the sonority of an organ. Quite often there are these huge bass notes at the bottom of the piano. If you were hearing it for the first time without having heard the original, you’d think it was originally an organ piece. It’s very interesting—and it contains as much Busoni as it does Bach.”

When it comes to the three Chopin pieces on the program, Grosvenor notes that he, too, has turned to historical sources for his inspiration, and in particular to recordings of pianists who were perhaps only a generation removed from the Polish virtuoso’s time.

“There are some wonderful Polish… Well, they’re not just Polish, they’re wonderful pianists who really seem to get the rhythm of the mazurka,” he says. “Ignaz Friedman was a wonderful Polish Chopin exponent at the beginning of the 20th century, and his mazurka recordings are particularly fine.…As for the Granados, the greatest exponent of Spanish music, generally, is probably Alicia de Larrocha—and I grew up listening to a lot of her recordings, so sometimes that can come through. But I really don’t do that much research. I just play the pieces and study the score and try to get into what the notes mean.”

As generous in crediting his influences as he is deft at the keyboard, Grosvenor only stumbles when asked what defines his own approach to making music.

“Um, I don’t know!” he says. “It’s very difficult to talk about one’s own playing. It’s kind of for other people to describe and judge, I suppose, but if you want to talk about the pianists that have influenced me, I’ve listened to a lot of recordings of people like [Vladimir] Horowitz and [Alfred] Cortot. They’re the pianists that have had the most influence on what I do, but I wouldn’t know how to describe my own playing.”

That’s a chore we’ll gladly take on. Grosvenor comes across as something of an old soul, but he approaches historical music with 21st-century vitality as well as scholarly powers of analysis—and he’s very much worth hearing.

Benjamin Grosvenor plays a Vancouver Recital Society concert at the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday (March 6).