When she was only ten years old, Pallavi Mahidhara made her début public appearance at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. After several first prizes at international competitions and with a considerable amount of gained experience, the American pupil of the late Dmitri Bashkirov was pursuing a remarkable career with concerts in Berlin, Paris, Budapest, and Washington D. C. when the pandemic brought everything to a halt in 2019. Now she is embarking once more on this musical endeavor, bringing a highly variegated programme for her first performance at the Ruhr Piano Festival, with Brahms’s Handel Variations as the highlight.