John Lill has spent the last six months marking his 60th birthday with a recital tour. The celebrations came to an end this week in a pair of orchestral concerts with the London Philharmonic, conducted by Walter Weller, performing Beethoven, the composer at the heart of Lill's music-making.

The first of the two concerts contained the first three piano concertos; this one was devoted to the fourth and fifth. The Prometheus Overture completed the programme, in a neat enough performance - though never suggesting it was anything more than a makeweight. Orchestrally, that set the tone and the standard for the evening: the accompaniments to both concertos were efficient without being inspired, well-mannered without being insightful.

Lill's playing had some high points, though never quite enough of them. His unfussy, muscular approach might have seemed more suited to the heroic grandeur of the Emperor Concerto, but in fact it was the Fourth that seemed the fresher performance, with skittish, almost Mozartian exchanges between the piano and the woodwind in the first movement, and maximum intensity wrung out of the trills in the Andante.

The finale was launched with tightly clipped rhythms, but afterwards speeds became uncertain, with accelerations through the statements of the main theme and the brakes applied in the lyrical episodes, so that the sense of momentum was lost. There was the same stop-go tendencies in the outer movements of the Fifth, where they were much more disruptive. Much of Lill's playing was firm but fair, and some of the transitions, especially in the slow movement, were beautifully managed, but it all seemed a bit provisional, and never settled.