Russian pianist Aleksandar Yakovlev plays the Vlada Divljan Cultural Centre in Belgrade on September 24 at 19:00, in a concert lit by candles alone. Tickets are around 740 denars.

Yakovlev was born in 1981 in Rostov-on-Don and has given more than 500 concerts to date. The stages he has performed on include the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, the Berlin Philharmonie, Victoria Hall in Geneva and Carnegie Hall in New York. That is a list rarely paired with a concert of club dimensions.

The programme covers Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Pletnev. The last name matters: Mikhail Pletnev is a pianist and conductor who wrote his own concert transcriptions of Tchaikovsky's ballets, technically among the hardest in the repertoire. Including them in a programme shows exactly what the performer wants to demonstrate.

The candlelit format in place of stage lighting has become recognisable across Europe in recent years, most often with string quartets and film music. Here the frame is classical: one pianist, one instrument and a repertoire from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Yakovlev plays the same programme in Novi Sad on September 25 and in Vršac on September 26, in three different rooms. Tickets for all three nights are through tickets.rs.