Man-Ling Bai does piano improv at Sunset Center.

When the Carmel Music Society presents the winner of their 2016 piano competition this weekend, the program offers an unusual twist: The first piece after intermission will feature a free-form improvisation by 22-year-old pianist Man-Ling Bai on a theme gathered from the audience. The Society has asked 12 audience members with musical backgrounds to write a short three-bar theme, which will be collected at intermission and hidden from Bai’s view until just before she goes onstage. “Man-Ling will blindly choose one of them,” the Society’s Anne Thorp says, “and she will then improvise on the chosen theme totally impromptu.”

Born in 1994 in Taipei, Taiwan, Bai began playing piano at age 6, and she has been composing music since age 7. One of her earliest compositions, written when she was just 10, was performed at the Yamaha Children Music Festival for nine seasons, and another, The Flower Fairy, debuted in Thailand at the Asia Oceania Junior Original Concerto Competition.

Last year’s piano competition represents the first in what has now become a biennial contest, replacing the Society’s one-time annual event which they have sponsored since 1976.

The 2016 version was a hotly contested battle. “It was extremely close,” Thorp says. “It wasn’t so much what she played but how she played it.” In the end, it was her innovative readings of both Bach’s Chaconne and Ravel’s La Valse that allowed Bai to prevail.

“She’s very poised and personable,” Thorp says. “Some of the other pianists were equally good technically, but there was the feeling that they weren’t quite as ready for a full professional career.”

The Bach and Ravel pieces accompany works by Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and contemporary Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin.

MAN-LING BAI 3pm Sunday, Jan. 11. Sunset Center Theater, Dolores and Ninth, Carmel. Free. 646-8511, www.carmelmusic.org.