Another prize winner from the Leeds International Piano Competition will finish Sidmouth Music’s season of concerts, on Saturday, March 14.

Thanks to Sidmouth Music's relationship with the competition, it has already brought the 2015 winner, Anna Tsybuleva, and the 2018 third prize winner, Xinyuan Wang, to play in the Parish Church.

The current season will finish with a recital at 7pm by the third prize winner from 2015, Vitaly Pisarenko.

Vitaly was playing aged six in his native Ukraine, then began formal training, leading to the State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in Moscow.

Now he studies at the Royal College of Music with pianist Dmitri Alexeev, himself a Leeds International Piano Competition winner, alongside pursuing a schedule of performance around the world.

For his Sidmouth concert Vitaly has chosen Beethoven's sonata in F minor op 2/1, the first of the set of thirty-two, now one of the major pillars of classical music.

Chopin's two polonaises opus 26 follow, written as the composer arrived, socially as well as physically, in Paris. Chopin wrote four Ballades, and no 3, composed some 6 years after the Polonaises, is from the time his relationship with the novelist George Sand was beginning.

After the interval Pisarenko moves on to the works of Franz Liszt. Funérailles is one of Liszt's mightiest compositions, said to be linked through its date of 1849 either to Chopin's death or in memory of the victims of the failed Hungarian revolution. Of quite different complexion is Valse Oubliée no 1 from late in Liszt's career, one of four 'forgotten waltzes' with a reflective, perhaps even sentimental, mood.

Despite its apparent nature Suite opus 14 by Béla Bartók was said by the composer not to contain any real folk tunes, but tunes entirely of his own invention which, he said, represented a shift in his technique away from his earlier post-romantic writing.

Bartok shifts the programme too, forwards from Liszt to the closing work; three pieces from Stravinsky's Firebird suite, transcribed by Guido Agosti.

The Danse Infernale, Berceuse and Finale will inevitably form an impressive finale to the evening's performance.

STEPHEN HUYSHE-SHIRES