LEWISTON – Evgeny Genchev closed his eyes, swayed, and let his imagination loose.

Anger and bombast erupted from the Steinway at the 18-year-old’s fingertips and filled the empty performance hall.

A moment later the music melted into a kind of melancholy. As the Franz Liszt composition changed moods, the banging on the piano’s keys turned soft and Genchev’s eyes flickered open.

Where did he go?

“I think of feelings,” Genchev said in lightly accented English. “It’s not a place. I don’t think of mountains.”

The emotions intended by the composer are what matter to the prodigy from Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

It’s what he works an average of seven hours a day to perfect. Not that he used the word “perfect” in describing his own playing.

“I am learning,” he said. And though his playing sounded magnificent Tuesday, he seemed nervous as he talked about a recital planned for Saturday afternoon at the Franco-American Heritage Center.

The Liszt piece will be joined by some Beethoven and Schumann works, compositions Genchev began rehearsing only two and a half months ago. He was worried about missing notes, he said.

Few listeners are likely to notice. Genchev, who began playing the piano at 8, rarely misses. He won national prizes in Bulgaria when he was 11. Two years later, he earned international acclaim in Europe.

Yet, as he tells it, he only became serious about his music in 2005, after meeting with an established soloist.

“I decided to see how far I can take this,” he said, nodding at the grand piano.

He enrolled in Bulgaria’s National School of Music and Dance and began traveling with Russian teacher Tamara Poddubnaya a year later.

With her, he came to Maine in 2006, winning the overall excellence award that summer at the International Piano Festival in Portland.

He plans to perform at the Franco-American Heritage Center for the first time in a 4 p.m. recital before Poddubnaya’s featured performance there on Saturday evening at 7:30 p.m.

Before the show, there will be hours and hours of rehearsal.

Though he sometimes practices four hours a day, he doesn’t feel relaxed at the piano with less than seven or eight hours of practice a day, he said. There are also studies to be done unrelated to music, including physics, chemistry and English.

It leaves little time for teenage fun.

“I enjoy the cinema, but I don’t have many chances to go,” said Genchev, whose rehearsal sweatshirt and jeans would look at home in any U.S. mall.

Perhaps there will be time later for girls, movies, staying out late and sleeping in on Sundays. For now, his focus is clearly on the piano.

“I meet people, I talk with them and I watch,” he said of his growing list of musician friends. Among them are local master Frank Glazer and Franco Center regular George Lopez.

“I watch their hands to see how they hit the keys, how they sit at the piano and how they interpret the music,” he said. “And I listen.”