Oxana Shevchenko impressed audiences with her performances at the Sydney International Piano Competition in 2016, the Kazakh pianist reaching the final six and taking out the prize for Best Piano Quintet for her performance of César Franck’s F Minor Quintet. With a little over a year to go before the next Sydney International Piano Competition, Shevchenko returned to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Verbrugghen Hall for an all-Russian recital culminating in a bewitching performance of Shostakovich’s Opus 57 Piano Quintet with the Tinalley String Quartet.

Oxana Shevchenko. Photo: supplied

The first half of the concert was Shevchenko’s alone, however, the pianist easing the audience into the program with Tchaikovsky’s Méditation from the Opus 72 pieces for solo piano. Shevchenko leaned into the lyricism of Tchaikovsky’s lush textures, maintaining incredible clarity – as she did throughout the recital – as she built the music’s impassioned climaxes and receded again to its delicate final notes. She brought a similar lyricism to Tchaikovsky’s Dumka – subtitled ‘Russian Rustic Scene’ – but garnished it with folk-music chirpiness and brilliant finger-work, as well as a taste of the muscular power (particularly in the brutal final notes) that was to...