Pianist Peter Katin's Wigmore Hall recital, his farewell to the London stage after a 55-year career, was a surreal and uncomfortable experience. His programme revisited the composers who have been closest to his heart throughout his performing life, from Mozart to Debussy. These performances should have sounded like a nostalgic reflection on music he knows and loves. But instead of a passionate leave-taking of the Wigmore Hall platform, what Katin gave his audience was a ghost of a recital, a shadow of the technique and musicality that sustained his earlier career.

The surface of Katin's playing, whether in Mozart's C major Sonata or Chopin's Third Ballade, was marred by technical errors, uncontrolled speeds, and a lack of interpretive control. Yet there were glimpses of the subtlety that used to define his playing: a beautifully turned phrase, or a delicately voiced chord. After an opening section that was uneven in tone and execution, Katin began the middle section of the first movement of the Mozart with calm assurance.

However, these were isolated moments of conviction, and there were never enough of them to knit together a performance of any of the larger works on the programme. In Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasie, one of Katin's favourite pieces, there were passages in which he captured a sense of style and fantasy, but the series of huge climaxes that cap the work were muddied by careless phrasing.

In the reverie of Chopin's Nocturne, Op 27 no 2, Katin conjured a seductive sound, a picture of meditative serenity, but during the rest of the concert there was something painful about watching a formerly brilliant pianist struggle with the decline of his technical gifts. Even if his spirit was willing, his body could not translate his musical imagination onto the keyboard.