It is an unenviable task for any pianist to stand in for Krystian Zimerman, who withdrew from last night's planned Festival Hall recital three weeks ago, but the American Garrick Ohlsson had bravely stepped into the breach.
Ohlsson used to be a London regular, but he has become a much rarer visitor of late. Evidently he has been keeping busy - his biography in the programme had novella-like proportions - and one of his current projects is a survey of Chopin's piano music for the CD label Arabesque.
That composer's B minor Sonata formed the centrepiece of his programme, and Ohlsson's performance was a microcosm of his approach throughout the evening - strong on feisty detail and no nonsense tone, short on simple lyrical expressiveness or any sense of a distinctive musical perspective.
There was something about the playing last night that was not quite connected - one phrase did not seem to relate to the next in a meaningful way, harmonic shifts passed by unremarked, and every so often all the muscle seemed to waste away.
He had opened with Beethoven F minor Sonata Op 2 no 1: it was perfectly respectable, unaffected, but in truth rather boring, lacking in real impetus or sense of period style. Ohlsson is happiest, one began to suspect, when he has lots of notes to deliver, and a second half of Rachmaninov certainly provided enough of those.
A group of transcriptions began it - three movements from Bach's E minor Violin Partita, rather short on charm, Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo, economical with wit - and then it was on to the Second Sonata.
It is hard work for any pianist to bring off, even in the user-friendly shortened version that Ohlsson played, and perhaps no one since Horowitz has really got its measure.
Much of the dogged, tumultuous writing suggests that Rachmaninov was trying to emulate Scriabin, working with motifs and a high level of chromaticism rather than the usual succulent big tunes and regretting their absence.
Ohlsson's account was busy and technically secure, but it was rather an onslaught, too monochrome, and in the end too unfocused to make sense.
