Dressed in a midnight blue gown, her glossy black hair swept behind her shoulders in an efficient ponytail, Joyce Yang emerges stage right and strides across the auditorium.

Her posture carries a playful determination as she approaches a lone Steinway grand piano, shining quietly in a blue spotlight the same hue as Yang’s dress.

She bows quickly, seats herself, and launches into Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons.

Melbourne Recital Centre. The Steinway awaits. Photo © Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

Yang is here at the Melbourne Recital Centre to present a showcase of the Russian masters, a program of works including preludes by Rachmaninov and arrangements for solo piano of Stravinsky’s Firebird and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Beginning with eight of Tchaikovsky’s 12 ‘character pieces’ within The Seasons, Yang returns to stage with a microphone and welcomes us to the performance presenting four of her favourite composers.

She is a compelling presence, adopting a colloquial posture as though speaking to us in a far smaller interior than that of the Recital Centre’s grand dimensions. The audience is perhaps at one-third capacity, all of us clustered in a small central pool at the feet of the Steinway grand.

Indeed, one...