Russian pianist Nikolai Kuznetsov plays a recital in the Great Hall of the Kolarac Endowment in Belgrade on December 13, starting at 8pm. The programme runs from Bach to Mussorgsky and closes with "Pictures at an Exhibition", a piece that demands both technique and a director's instinct from a pianist.

Kuznetsov was born in Moscow on December 26, 1994, into a large family of musicians. At nine he entered the Gnessin special music school for gifted children in Moscow, then the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory. He finished his doctoral studies in 2021 with top marks, supervised by Nikolai Lugansky and Andrei Pisarev.

That same year he took the Grand Prix at the Monte-Carlo Piano Masters, a competition that is not an open call but an invitation to a small group of already established pianists, held under the patronage of Prince Albert II. In a career where the prizes run into the dozens, that is the one that carries the most weight.

The Belgrade programme takes in Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky. That is a span from Baroque polyphony to late nineteenth-century Russian pianism, and a recital built that way is a test of repertoire breadth, not just of fingers. "Pictures at an Exhibition" at the end is a telling choice: the piece is conceived as a walk through an exhibition, each movement another painting, and played badly it collapses into a string of unconnected etudes.

The Kolarac hall has an acoustic that Belgrade audiences know by heart, and in which a piano is heard without amplification. Tickets via tickets.rs start at 2,500 dinars, around 1,320 denars, for an evening where the weight of the programme justifies the price.