From the ridiculous to the nearly sublime. A recital by Richard Goode at the Barbican on Saturday was as good a way as any to erase memories of a grotesque display by Evgeny Kissin two nights earlier. Where Kissin has nothing to offer but technique, and promotes that at the expense of whatever hapless work he is playing, Goode puts all his resources at the service of the music.

Not everything was totally satisfactory. His opening Mozart sonata, the F major K533, fell a little flat: there was beautifully purled counterpoint in the first movement and elegantly arching phrases in the Andante, but not enough contours, not quite enough presence. A group of four Debussy preludes was rather earthbound too.

The other two works received absolutely superlative performances. Goode's Beethoven has long been admired, but this seamless account of the Op 81a Sonata, Les Adieux, suggested that it is becoming yet more magisterial.

Even that, though, paled alongside his reading of Schubert's late A major Sonata, in which each movement brought fresh revelations - the magically poetic transition between exposition and development in the opening Allegro, the voicing of the main theme of Andante, sounding like a visitation from the world of Die Winterreise, and the right hand's sparkling dialogue with itself, alternately in the treble and the bass, in the finale. This was Schubert of peerless comprehensiveness.

Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy were also featured in Pierre-Laurent Aimard's programme at the Festival Hall yesterday, but here the disappointment far outweighed the pleasure, which only really came in Messiaen's two Ile de Feu studies. Aimard is unequalled in such 20th-century repertoire, and there were good, neat things in the other works too, but never enough. Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata acquired drama only in its finale, while the first book of Debussy's Images, which ought to have suited Aimard, turned out monochrome.