In the pantheon of Hungarian pianists, Dezso Ranki is an unfamiliar figure. He is part of the same prodigious generation as Andras Schiff and Zoltan Kocsis, but Ranki is virtually unknown in this country. His Wigmore Hall recital revealed what we have been missing: music making of bluff honesty and technical assurance.

His programme was a constellation of miniatures by Bartok, Liszt and Debussy. He transformed a selection of Bartok's Mikrokosmos pieces from pedagogical studies into deft poetic images, conjuring a creepy chromaticism in From the Diary of a Fly, and creating a blistering obsessive onslaught in the Ostinato. But as well as relishing the percussive brilliance of the piano writing, he found a weird, dissonant lyricism in Bartok's meditation on Minor Seconds - Major Sevenths.

He approached Debussy's Children's Corner with the same combination of clarity and precision but his playing lacked charm, especially in Jumbo's Lullaby, Debussy's depiction of the slumber of a toy elephant. However, he created a delicate, shimmering snowstorm in the fourth number, The Snow Is Dancing, as rhythmic, staccato phrases melted into a continuous, slippery sonority.

The most imaginative juxtaposition on the programme was between Bartok's Op. 14 Suite and a selection of Liszt pieces, as Ranki elided them into another without a break. He created connections between the expressive world of early Bartok and the limpid dissonance of Liszt's La lugubre gondola No. 2, and was no less impressive in the diabolical virtuosity of the fourth Mephisto Waltz. Yet there was something strangely remote about his playing, and for all its technical command and conviction, his performances of Liszt burned with a cold fire. Bartok's Out of Doors Suite completed the programme, but even in the brutal energy of the outer movements, Ranki's playing was admirable rather than emotive.