In the symphony’s season finale, pianist takes on some powerful, dramatic pieces.

Musicians who began playing as kids or even toddlers usually credit a musical family environment – like a father who was a conductor or a mother who was a violinist. For Cuban-born virtuoso Marcos Madrigal, who started on his instrument at age 3, it was a bit different.

“It happened because my babysitter was a piano teacher,” Madrigal recalls. “While watching me, she taught for six hours every day, and I soaked it up like a sponge.”

Twenty years later, in 2007, he graduated with honors from the University of Arts of Cuba (ISA) in Havana, under the guidance of the renowned professor and pianist Teresita Junco. Recitals and guest solo appearances around Europe followed, as did his winning a competition to attend the International Piano Academy in Lake Como, Italy. In 2015, after treks to Vienna, Rome, Bucharest, Granada, London and Latin America to perform, he gave a celebrated U.S. debut at Finney Hall at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Madrigal comes our way this weekend as part of the Monterey Symphony’s final concert of the 2018-2019 season, the programming of which is decidedly traditional and highly dramatic. The outing opens with a reading of the overture to Richard Wagner’s 1843 opera The Flying Dutchman, which depicts a raging storm and high seas. It ends with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which boasts perhaps the most well-known opening motif in all Western music. Sandwiched between will be Madrigal tackling Frédéric Chopin’s technically treacherous Piano Concerto No. 2, which features fiery opening and closing movements bridging an elegant, sensitive nocturne in the middle.

“While I’ve performed this Chopin concerto many times when I was much younger, it is very special to come back to it now that I’m older,” Madrigal says. “The beautiful second movement nocturne is perhaps the most famous, but for me I love the really intense runs of the first. And of course, given my Latin roots, the dance-like third movement is really a big pleasure to play.”

Madrigal pounces on the keyboard like a hungry lion taking its prey in the rapid-fire sections of a piece, only to waft sensitive and elegant in softer passages.

“We are the interpreters,” he says. “We must breathe life into these great works of art. While I love the fast, loud, technically challenging passages, I tend to work a lot in the deepness of the soul. In pianissimo [the lowest volume] lies the depths of human psychological reality.”

MARCOS MADRIGAL, PIANO 8pm Saturday, May 18; 3pm Sunday, May 19. Sunset Center, San Carlos and Ninth, Carmel. $61-$81. 646-8511, montereysymphony.org