A piano recital that features a piece with no notes, only the pianist scraping the outside of the instrument to produce sounds like distant gunfire, seems the height of avant-garde intellectualism. But Formenti's concert of music by German composer Helmut Lachenmann was a thrilling display of pianistic possibility.

Formenti threw himself into Lachenmann's world of musical extremes, relishing the single-minded strangeness of the seven movements of Ein Kinderspiel (Child's Play). One piece consisted of a single, repeated chord; the drama of the movement was based on the different ways the chord could be made to resonate, by holding down some notes longer than others, and creating strange effects by allowing the chord to echo with other parts of the piano's compass. Another movement consisted of a hammered rhythm at the very top of the piano's range.

These playful but disturbing miniatures were defined by the strength of individual musical gestures, but Lachenmann's Serynade was a different prospect: a single, 25-minute movement and an attempt to create a meaningful larger structure. Formenti was brilliantly attuned to the violence of much of the music - passages in which he thumped the keyboard with his elbows, pumped the piano's pedals, and battered the bottom notes in a pummelling ostinato - but he did not connect these moments. The long-breathed lines of Lachenmann's music escaped Formenti, even if he captured the visceral intensity of this remarkable music.