Auckland Philharmonia at Auckland Town Hall

Tomorrow, when Marc-Andre Hamelin takes the stage for Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, it could well be the concert of the year.

Best known here as a recording artist, the Canadian pianist has an impressive catalogue of 30 albums on Hyperion Records.

You will find the occasional Schumann and Liszt, with Haydn and Brahms in the pipeline, but names like Roslavets, Ornstein and Szymanowski stand out.

Still, if you want your Chopin with a twist, Hamelin's 1999 award-winning set of the Etudes as fancied up by Leopold Godowsky, is a jaw-dropping revelation.

Hamelin's father introduced him to Godowsky. "I remember when I was 7 or 8, sitting on the bed with my father, looking at this music with bug-eyed wonder. The look of the music is quite astonishing, especially when you compare it with the original Chopin."

The latest Hamelin-Hyperion collaboration offers Scharwenka and Rubinstein Piano Concertos as volume 38 in the label's Romantic Piano Concerto series. There are thrills by the bar in this perfect corrective for those jaded with their Griegs and Schumanns.

"I have always considered it a kind of a mission to play this music," says Hamelin. "I want people to realise the piano repertoire is far from being as stale as it might seem when you go to recitals and concerto performances."

His latest project for investigation is Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978), a new name in my notebook, but a composer as well known in Bulgaria as Sibelius is in Finland. The Philadelphia-based pianist also plays American repertoire, most recently in last year's coupling of Barber and Ives sonatas.

Ives' Concord Sonata is close to his heart, especially its expansive Emerson movement.

"You can't analyse it," Hamelin says. "You don't know where the ideas come from and that creates a real mystery. It seems like pure inspiration and the harmonic world is completely his own.

"I'm a big one for harmony. It's the driving force over and above melody. Melody is a close second, but you need the harmony to back it up, to determine and define form."

It seems a good time to talk Rachmaninov and I ask him what appeals with such standard fare as tomorrow night's concerto.

"The appeal is certainly not pianistic," Hamelin laughs. "I won't conceal the fact that the third movement is horribly overwritten.

"I can find so many places where notes could even be taken out.

"These are early pieces, but Rachmaninov's schedule didn't allow him to revise them, which I am sure he would have done, rather drastically. But how to talk about a piece one is so close to and the public is so close to?" he asks.

"The melodic material is absolutely fantastic, a force that drives the work from beginning to end. That can't be denied.

"There is a wealth of detail for those who like that sort of thing. Opulence. There's nothing like it."

Hamelin, who occasionally contributes a work to his own albums, is keen that today's pianists try putting their own notes on paper.

"I wish schools stressed more the enormous benefits of composition because it's my feeling that people don't know what they are playing, what it's all about.

"For them, choosing a piece is like going to the supermarket and taking something off the shelf.

"They should try composing so they can realise how brain-racking and emotion-racking it is. These things don't come easy." 

What: Auckland Philharmonia, with Marc-Andre Hamelin
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow, 8pm
On disc: The Romantic Piano Concerto Volume 38, with Hamelin playing Scharwenka and Rubinstein (Hyperion CDA 67508, through Ode Records)