LEWISTON – Virtuoso pianist and master teacher Tamara Poddubnaya, Ph.D., will present the final Piano Series program of this season Saturday, May 2, at the Franco-American Heritage Center.

Poddubnaya’s 7:30 p.m. recital will follow 4 p.m. performances by her students, 19-year-old Evgeny Genchev and 21-year-old Dimitar “Mitko” Dimitrov. The two promising pianists from Europe will play works by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Scriabin.

A distinguished graduate of St. Petersburg’s Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, Poddubnaya, a native of Georgia in the Caucasus, soon established herself as one of Russia’s foremost keyboard artists and piano teachers. Renowned for her masterful command of a vast repertoire, she teaches and performs in Russia, the Netherlands and the United States, where she is professor of piano at the Long Island Conservatory and visiting professor at the Portland Conservatory of Music. She frequently serves on juries at international piano competitions.

Genchev began playing the piano at age 8 and began studying with Poddubnaya six years later. Following graduation from the National School of Music and Dance Arts in his home city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studies with Christopher Elton, head of the keyboard department. Genchev won first prize in piano competitions in the Netherlands and Bulgaria, as well as at the LISMA Festival at SUNY-Old Westbury, Long Island.

In 2007, he won the prestigious Valery Gavrilin Competition in Vologda, Russia, and in June and July 2007, he participated in the Portland Conservatory’s International Piano Festival and Music without Borders, the piano festival at Gould Academy in Bethel. Last summer, he performed Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto with the Plovdiv Philharmonic, one of the oldest symphony orchestras in Europe.

Another veteran of the Portland Conservatory and Bethel festivals, Dimitrov is a graduate of the National School of Music in Sofia, Bulgaria, and now studies with Poddubnaya at the Prins Claus Conservatorium, Groningen, the Netherlands. He has given solo recitals in the Netherlands, as well as in his native Bulgaria and in Paris.

He won first prize in competitions in Bulgaria and Italy, and in 2008, received the Grand Prix of the Maria Yudina International Competition in Saint Petersburg. He was awarded both the youth and senior competition prizes at Amsterdam’s 2007 Grachten Festival. Those awards resulted in his participation in the prestigious Master Class Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, immediately following his attendance last July at Music without Borders in Bethel.

Earlier this year, he toured with the North Netherlands Orchestra and in March, he collaborated with violinist Quirine Scheffers, concertmaster of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, in a recital at the Hague.

Concert tickets are $15 for adults, $12 for seniors: all seats reserved. A single ticket will admit the holder to both performances. Students 21 and younger will be admitted without charge, but need to reserve seats. For tickets, call 689-2000 or go online to www.francoamericanheritage.org.