Tippett composed four piano sonatas as well as a piano concerto, but his writing for the instrument was never exactly idiomatic. In the Wigmore Hall, where Steven Osborne played the composer's first two piano sonatas alongside Ravel (the Sonatine), Gershwin (the three Preludes) and Bartok (a selection from the last book of Mikrokosmos), their textures and effects sometimes seemed cluttered and over-rhetorical.

Yet the pieces are among the most effective of Tippett's instrumental works - the Third and Fourth Sonatas seem prolix by comparison - and Osborne's performances of them were very fine. The other composers had been included in the Wigmore's centenary celebration programme not to show up the limitations of Tippett's piano writing, but to make musical points and to illuminate his relation to modernism. Even if Ravel's delicately tinted world seems light years away from Tippett's robustly English one, they connect through a 19th-century inheritance. Osborne's performance of the 1938 First Sonata underlined the work's debts to the virtuoso tradition of Liszt, Rachmaninov and even Debussy, as well as its almost rudely direct approach to rhythm and moments of expansive romantic melody.

The Second Sonata, from 1962, is an altogether tighter, tougher and more satisfying piece, inhabiting a different musical universe. It is one of Tippett's most demanding pieces, a further exploration of the sound world he developed for his second opera, King Priam; the sonata incorporates material from the stage work into its single-movement mosaic. Osborne's performance was titanic - easily the best I've ever heard - with every gesture given its full dramatic weight.

His decision to follow it with Ives' even more terse Three Page Sonata was a masterstroke. Tippett surely could not have heard it before he wrote his own sonata, but the parallels are astonishingly close.