The Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra closes out its fifth season this weekend with a fitting finale: the great pianist Andre Watts performing Rachmaninoff’s classic Piano Concerto No. 2.

Watts has been a star in classical music since 1963, when the 16-year-old prodigy played with Leonard Bernstein’s nationally televised Young People’s Concert series with the New York Philharmonic, then was a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould a scant three weeks later, again with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra gave him a standing ovation for that performance.

He’s proved that he deserved the Grammy he won that year for Most Promising New Classical Music Artist, with an illustrious performing, recording and teaching career, four more Grammy nominations, and awards and recognition from several major music schools and arts programs.

Sounding youthful despite his status as elder statesman — he turns 71 this month — among American concert pianists, Watts sees a world of opportunity these days for young musicians willing to put in the time and work.

“Things are more open, there’s more information available, and students can feel freer about exploring different aspects of classical music, or simply different forms of all kinds of music,” said Watts, who in addition to performing teaches at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

“Information travels more quickly. You have it at your fingertips with your phone, you can look up where competitions are, what results are, what’s coming up. You can get to publishers more readily. You can get to hear — it might be from YouTube, which is wonderful in its own way — repertoire that you otherwise might not hear.”

Watts’ early exposure to music, other than lessons, consisted of being “a big record listener when I was young,” and “sneaking into an awful lot of concerts as a teenager at the Philadelphia Academy of Music,” where he would hear pianists such as Arthur Rubinstein and Russian virtuoso Yakov Flier.

As a youngster, he got introduced to the virtuosic, uber-emotional music of Franz Liszt through his mother, a native of Hungary, resulting in what the Los Angeles Times, in a review in April 2016, called “his fiery Romantic temperament” as a performer.

Watts is a demonstrative presence in performance — people often wonder whether he is talking to himself on stage because of the facial expressions he makes, which he says are simply a “bad mannerism.”

Those early years as a performer taught him some things about larger society as well.

Watts is African-American, the son of an American soldier who married Watts’ Hungarian mother while based in Germany. When Watts began to tour as a teenager — his parents had divorced by that time — his mother would accompany him, and he remembers his manager saying that in some places it was technically illegal to share the same suite with her because of the difference in their skin colors.

He also believes that his ethnicity helped propel his career, but thinks there’s more work to do on race relations.

“Every once in a while, I look out at the world and think, ‘Good Lord, things haven’t gotten better at all,’ which isn’t really true,” he said. “In many ways it’s much better.”

Watts’ appearance here marks his return to the concert stage after several months off dealing with prostate cancer. He was diagnosed last summer and gave his last public performance in September. Having overcome a previous medical scare — bleeding in the brain, in 2002 — in a remarkably short three months, he thought that he would be performing again in January. Dealing with the effects of chemotherapy delayed that plan.

Now that he is able to put in the requisite practice time, he is completely confident that he will be able to scale the monumental “Rach 2.”

It’s an ideal vehicle, since the work also represented a comeback for Rachmaninov, who battled depression for years leading up to its creation. Nowadays, its grand, sweeping melodies are recognizable in “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” popularized by Frank Sinatra, and Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself,” as well as in film and television soundtracks.

“It has everything. It has intimacy, it has virtuosity, it has big heroic places, it has melting, beautiful tones. It’s pretty spectacular,” Watts said.

“In the middle of my career, I didn’t play this concerto for 12 years,” he said. “I just found that I was doing it a little bit rote, and I canceled it for the rest of that season and I thought, ‘I’m not going to play until I feel that I have to.‘ I thought that would take two years, but it took 12.”

Maestro Naoto Otomo, always welcome by local audiences and musicians, guest-conducts. At the concert, the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra will also perform “The Firebird,” by Stravinsky. The groundbreaking work is one of the most powerful and exciting in the orchestral repertoire.