Pianist Michel Bourdoncle will treat Hanoi audiences a recital at the French Cultural Centre, L'Espace, next Friday.

The pianist will play four pieces including Chaconne for the Left Hand by Johnnes Brahms, The Valley of Oberman by Franz Liszt, Overture and Serenade for Left Hand by Sciabine and Rhapsody in Blue.

The 50-year old pianist began his musical studies in Aix-en-Provence . He continued at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris where he won the First Prize for Chamber Music and the First Prize for Piano in the classes of Genevieve Joy and Dominique Merlet.

He won the Acanthes International Competition in 1984 in the presence of Iannis Xenakis. After that he received a scholarship from the French government to study at the Tchaikovski Conservatoire in Moscow .

He was the prize winner of the Liszt Competition in Utrecht in 1986. Since then, Bourdoncle has pursued a triple career as a concert pianist, a teacher at the Darius Milhaud Conservatoire in Aix-en-Provence and an artistic director.

He created the International Festival Les Nuits Pianistiques which takes place every year in Aix-en-Provence .

In 2006, he established the International Pianistical Academy of Aix-en-Provence. He has performed in many countries in the world with orchestras including Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and l'Orchestre de Chambre de la Radio de Bucharest.

He often serves as a judge in the competitions of the Conservatoires Nationaux Superieur and in various International Competitions. He will be one of the jury members at the first Vietnam International Piano Contest in September.

He performed with the Hanoi Philharmonic Orchestra 2009 on the occasion of the French National Day.

The concert will open with 17-minute Chaconne for the Left Hand.

A chaconne is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression.

Since Bach's time, several transcriptions of the piece have been made for other instruments, particularly for the piano by piano/left-hand by Brahms.

Study after a Chaconne by Bach is a piece by the early romantic composer Johannes Brahms. The composition was first published in 1879 and is included in Brahm's Piano Studies.

The concert will begin at 8pm. Tickets are available at 24 Trang Tien street , Hanoi./.