Of the 11 soloists in the 2006/7 South Bank International Piano Series, Imogen Cooper is the only one to programme a work by a living composer. She opened her second half with a piece she premiered 10 years ago, Thomas Adès's Traced Overhead, in which the composer suggests we "imagine a recording device sent up into space, then making a transcription of the data it brought back, in the form of sounds heard above our heads".

The result is a characteristically vivid and virtuosic upwardly mobile excursion, full of sweeping arabesques and flamboyant darts to the top of the keyboard. Cooper had it comprehensively under her fingers, with enough technique spare to make sense of its quick-change artist's shifts of identity.

Both in scope and sheer length, this was an exceptionally challenging programme. Cooper's opener was one of Haydn's last sonatas, No 60 in C major in the most recent catalogue, written in England and dedicated to the London-based pianist Therese Jansen. Instead of using this piece as a superior warm-up exercise, Cooper provided a performance fully alert to its inherent drama, offering a wide range of dynamic and a striking sense of the character of its musical ideas.

There was the odd moment here, and in the performance of Schumann's Kreisleriana that followed, when her idiosyncratic pedalling added a cloudy harmonic background to the written notes; yet ultimately this seemed a minor mannerism compared to her careful highlighting of the important lines in Schumann's densely textured work, much of it written in the potentially muddy middle part of the keyboard. Once again Cooper's exposition of the music's split personality was masterly. But her finest performance was of Schubert's substantial A minor Sonata D845, whose grand structure she set out with an absolute certainty of vision and whose most delicate moments drew from her playing of almost inexpressible tonal beauty.