Alexander Gavrylyuk delivers powerhouse Prokofiev to Naples audiences

Anyone counting up the top classical concerts you'd seen all season before Thursday night, you started counting too soon. Alexander Gavrylyuk nearly set the Artis—Naples Steinway on fire Thursday night, and possibilities are good he would do it again Friday night on the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1.

And after Thursday, there would be some people coming back to relive the experience.

You do not have to be a fan of this concerto. You do not  have to be able to pronounce his name (gah-vee-LOOK). You do not even have to like classical music to be awed by Gavrylyuk's performance, made more real by the piano cam following the blur of his hands once its opening theme had sparked.

It was difficult to count how many notes he could play per second —more than four — in this demanding tapestry of  a work. But speed, although essential, is only in its body, not its soul. A sucessful performance demands a clear-eyed passion, and Gavrylyuk obviously owns that. He towered over the keyboard, as though delivering personal commands; at times during the more subdued second movement he leaned back, as if to savor it as a listener as much as a performer.

Even its second movement, after its tranquil opening, gives you cause to fear for the piano's life. This is the music that set Prokofiev apart as the enfant terrible of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. (But he still won a grand piano in the conservatory's concerto competition with this very work.)

 Tthe final movement nails in a little humor; the opening has that carful-of-clowns roll of staccato notes before it develops and returns to the opening theme and you think — at least when Gavrylyuk is performing — oh, darn, this is over.

No concerto is written without an orchestral embrace of it, and the Naples Philharmonic, under the baton of guest conductor Rossen Milanov, was a bear hug. It was sharp, precise, dynamic and  made this work alone worth the price of admission.

No doubt some of us had come for the Beethoven Symphony No. 3, the "Eroica," in the second half. It was sturdy, with moments of joy: Milanov barely stepped onto the podium before he signaled its two "Bam!" opening chords, a surprise and a delight. The Bulgarian-born Milanov is a visually interpretive conductor, and it was fun to watch him work during this one, hitting swaths of music as if with a brush and pulling sound down from the rafters.

But we're here for the music, and  this performance seemed to have lower dynamic range than we'd like, especially in the introspective second movement. We would have also hoped for a little sharper sound from the strings, and wondered whether it was because they were all arranged on one side, facing away from the ears of the hall's left-side audience on Thursday. 

There were  beautiful solo moments, thanks to principal Judy Christy's oboe and, in the first movement, from principal horn Ryan Little. The horn section brought home the famous third-movement "hunting call" phrase beautifully and principal timpanist John Evans kept a judiciously contained power behind it all.

But the performance generally lacked a bit of, well, heroics. 

The concert opened with a work by a 20th-century Bulgarian composer, Pancho Vladigerov, "Improvisation and Toccata," that was such intriguing listening we'd like to hear more from him. It opens with tantalizing harmonics, some of them reminiscent of Canteloube's "Bailèro" from "Chants d'Auvergne," but broader and less mystical. Vladigerov's variations were a floating island of sound, with a tranquility piped in by the winds; the shift to the toccata, when the brass took over, was forceful but not a whack on the head as we've heard in some compositions. 

There's an energy in the second half that peaks, and then pulls into the station with a freight-train of a march, and we loved it. 

We've come to hate the word accessible because it sounds like classical music for six-year-olds. So let's call the Vladigerov work one available to all ears, and the maiden hearing here Thursday would have made the composer proud.

This is the last Masterworks concert of the year, but live classical music lovers don't have to go into mourning. We have another week of Stay in May Festival works, and the philharmonic's annual free chamber music concerts around town are May 29-June 3; see artisnaples.org for details.

If you go

Masterworks Final Program

Where: Hayes Hall, Artis-Naples, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd., North Naples

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Tickets: $15-$72

To buy: artisnaples.org, 239-597-1900 or at the box office