Serbian-born pianist Ana Bursac, now a multiple international competition prize winner, made a welcome return to Harris Manchester College to give a recital on the newly-refurbished Steinway grand. This itself was appropriate, since Bursac had herself became a Steinway and Sons Scholar for her studies at the Royal College of Music.

The programme began with two of Schubert’s Impromptus D.935. The tense opening drama, driving rhythm and the richness of tone that Bursac brought to No. 1 in F minor gave an immediate foretaste of the delights to come. Ana conveyed a natural affinity with the often unexpected modulations that Schubert revels in. Her sense of dialogue, treating the development almost like a ballad, with a little nod to J S Bach, led to the bouncy rhythms and sheer joy of the conclusion, Bursac almost dancing herself while seated at the keyboard. Her sensitive handling of the Ländler-like No. 2 in A flat was less like a dance but, rather, beautifully wistful, the singing tone almost evoking imagined past joys.

How fitting that Bursac continued with Liszt, having last year been a prize winner at the Danubia Talents Liszt International Online Piano Competition. Funérailles, written in 1849 in response to the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 by the Habsburgs, conveyed a dark and mournful mood. Ana Bursac was more than equal to the challenge, her playing exuding total authority and a sinister resonance of tolling bells as she created an audio image of the battlefield with wounded soldiers limping home from war. Her resonant bass and massive crescendos led, via the funeral march itself with its heavy triplets and flattened accidentals, to the relief of the central section in the major key: triumphant despite everything, with irrepressible left hand octaves reminiscent of those in Chopin’s A flat Polonaise. Alas, we returned to the carnage. Here, Bursac showed an extraordinary maturity, conveying with passion the pointlessness and loneliness of war, and the chilling reality of death. This was playing by turns intimate and epic. A shattering emotional experience.

It was indeed to Chopin that we turned next, and to his Ballade No. 4, described by John Ogden as containing “the experience of a lifetime”. Bursac brought an intuitive sense of rubato to her playing, magisterial even as the accompaniment to the elegiac melody became ever more complex. Yet at a stroke, it became now playful and delicate, now exuberant, now profound and reflective. Here was a young pianist able to create a genuinely orchestral sound from the instrument, not least in the fabulous climax that scaled the heights of virtuosity and exhibited her compelling musicianship.

To the delight of the audience, Ana Bursac give a surprise encore in the shape of Dark Velvet, by the Serbian composer Isidora Zebeljan who died at the tragically young age of 53 in 2020. This dreamy, uneasy work with its uncertain tonalities was a reminder, particularly at this time of tragic turbulence in Europe, that all is not always well with the world.

The huge emotional range and glorious sonorities of this recital confirmed one thing above all: the name of Ana Bursac is definitely one to watch in the future.