PIANIST Kathryn Stott opens a new season for Malvern Concert Club next week with a programme of music from each decade of the 20th Century.

Ravel, Faure, Gershwin, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Maxwell Davies are among the composers featured in Thursday's concert at The Forum at the Malvern Theatres.

It will be the third time Ms Stott has been a guest of the club, the first being in 1977 with cellist Colin Carr and the second, a solo performance in 1991.

Kathryn studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School before graduating to the Royal College of Music. Her international career was launched with victory in the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1978 and she has since performed in Britain, Europe and Hong Kong.

Recordings have included the complete works for solo piano and Ballade by Gabriel Faure and the 1997 Grammy Award winning collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma, The Soul of the Tango.

Also in 1997, she performed the world premiere of the Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's piano concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, taking it to Linz the following year.

She was also artistic director of a festival celebrating the music of Faure in Manchester in 1995, for which the French government appointed her Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

She was also artistic director for the festival Out of the Shadows, focusing on the work of Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann in Liverpool in 1998 and Piano 2000, at Manchester.

Earlier this year she completed a US tour with Yo-Yo Ma and in May performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

The Malvern concert is at 7.30pm. Tickets are £10, £4 for students in full time education, from 01684 892277.