Like all great pianists, Mikhail Pletnev is unpredictable. Some of his recitals are extrovert, high-voltage affairs in which he reaches out to communicate with his audience; in others, he appears more introverted, and the listener has to work harder to reap the rewards of such peerless playing and sharp-witted musical insights.

Here Pletnev was definitely expecting the audience to come to him. The main works in his programme - Schumann's C major Fantasy Op17 and Tchaikovsky's Grand Sonata Op37 - are expansive musical statements. They were preceded by smaller-scale pieces by the same composers, and Pletnev's playing of them both was curiously contained. The stunning technique was always there, whether dispatching the fiendish coda of the second movement of the Fantasy with awesome precision or plotting his course through the bravura swathes of the outer movements of the sonata with unruffled certainty. But the virtuosity was never an end in itself.

There was something almost didactic about the way Pletnev shaped Schumann's first movement, as if he was determined to demonstrate that it was the start of a major and profound musical journey, and at times the rhetorical pauses and the measured approach to some episodes threatened to deprive the music of its impetus. But the work is, he underlined, a fantasy, liable to take off in unexpected directions without warning, and that is what his performance suggested: prodigious invention braced against the constraints of formal integration.

Tchaikovsky's sonata is more unruly, though the debts to Schumann and to Chopin's large-scale forms are ever present. The piano writing is dense and sometimes unremitting, but Pletnev cut through that to find the bones of the work beneath, making the cross-rhythms of the Scherzo perfectly lucid, giving the big melodies a melting elegance and letting the pedal notes that underpin so many passages explode with a Horowitz-like finality.

The smaller works - five pieces from Schumann's Bunte Bätter Op99 and Tchaikovsky's strange, episodic Dumka Op59 - were exquisite in their contrasted ways, with everything perfectly in scale, and there was a single encore of an unidentified piece of Tchaikovsky. There are times in Pletnev's recitals when he unfurls a whole stream of encores, each more dazzling than the last. This, though, was a different sort of occasion.