This performance, part of the orchestra’s occasional Quick Fix at Half Six series, was a truncated version of a program that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra had delivered twice already over the previous Friday and Saturday nights (the full programme included the Polonaise from Act III of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin and the final movement from Smetena’s Má vlast).

As quick fixes go, we got quite the hit.

Joyce Yang. Photo supplied

The concert opened with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with South Korean pianist Joyce Yang giving a commanding, technically assured rendition of the notoriously challenging work.

She was expertly accompanied by conductor Xian Zhang, who has a clearly demonstrative and energetic podium technique but the clarity of texture it delivered also served to highlight moments – just a few (especially in the long transition passages in the first movement) – where soloist and orchestra were not entirely in sync.

Overall, however, it remained an impressive rendition, from a soloist of the first rank, of a concerto that deservedly ranks as one of the composer’s finest works.

It is a piece that, in the way that its deceptively simple opening theme becomes the...