Violinist Irina Muresanu closes her six-day residency at the FAMES Institute with the concert "For Love" on 16 September at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. The programme is built around a single theme running through four composers from different eras, a riskier choice than the usual chronological line-up because it forces the works to hold up against each other.

Muresanu was born in Romania and has performed across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia and South Africa. She graduated from the Bucharest Academy in 1994, then continued in the US at the University of Illinois and the New England Conservatory, where she studied with the legendary French violinist Michele Auclair and earned a doctorate in musical arts. She is a laureate and top-prize winner at several international competitions, among them Montreal, Queen Elisabeth and UNISA. Today she is a professor at the University of Maryland, and has also taught at Harvard and MIT. She plays a violin built by Giuseppe Rocca in 1849.

The evening opens with the Romance by Amy Beach, an American composer whose music sat on the margins of the repertoire for a long time. Next comes Philip Glass's "Echorus" for two solo violins, then Pablo de Sarasate's virtuoso "Carmen" fantasy drawn from Bizet's opera, and the programme is rounded off by Arnold Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night", written after a poem by Richard Dehmel. That is a span from late Romanticism through Spanish virtuosity to the early Schoenberg, who is still writing tonally but is already looking somewhere else.

The concert is the closing event of a programme in which young classical musicians from across Europe stayed in Skopje and worked with Muresanu through intensive rehearsals and group sessions. It starts at 9pm on 16 September, and a ticket costs 500 denars through mktickets.mk. For that money, a violinist with a biography like this is not usually heard in a room holding a hundred people.