Aleksandar Yakovlev closes his Serbian run of candlelit concerts at the Sterija National Theatre in Vršac on September 26 at 19:00. Tickets are around 1,000 denars, the highest price of the three nights.

Yakovlev was born in 1981 in Rostov-on-Don and has more than 500 concerts behind him. He has performed at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, the Berlin Philharmonie, Victoria Hall in Geneva and Carnegie Hall in New York. The programme takes in Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mikhail Pletnev, whose transcriptions of Tchaikovsky's ballets are among the technically hardest works ever written for piano.

Vršac is a town of around 35,000 in southern Banat, some fifty kilometres from Belgrade and right by the Romanian border. The Sterija National Theatre carries the name of Jovan Sterija Popović, the founder of Serbian comedy writing. For a town this size, a solo recital by a pianist with this biography is not routine programming.

The candlelit format, with no stage lighting, changes the dynamic in the hall further. In half-darkness there is nowhere to look but at the instrument.

The fact that the same programme is performed in three different towns on three consecutive nights, in entirely different rooms, means the sound will not be identical in any of them. The previous two stops were Belgrade on September 24 and Novi Sad on September 25. Tickets through tickets.rs.