Schubert's great B Flat Piano Sonata, D 960, dates from the last months of his life and is widely regarded as forming one of music's most searing encounters with mortality. Its emotional landscape is so unique that many have assumed its composition constituted a spontaneous outpouring of feeling on Schubert's part, and that the work itself exists in some kind of cultural vacuum, cut off from predecessors or influences.

In his carefully programmed recital, however, Lars Vogt tacitly reminded us of its congruence with a pair of Mozart's piano works, probably dating from 1783 - the Sonatas in C and A, K 330 and K 331, respectively. All three share a number of compositional techniques, notably the use of tugging rhythmic monotones to stir emotions of yearning or nostalgia, and the demand that the pianist repeatedly crosses hands to create figurations and echoes that seem to ripple away from the main thematic material and resonate into eternity.

Interpretatively, however, Vogt envisions Mozart and Schubert as being poles apart. His Mozart is boyish, impulsive, the dark emotions constantly peeping out from beneath the music's dazzling, bejewelled surfaces. The opening of the C Major Sonata was all mercurial, throwaway charm, while the famous Rondo all Turca that closes the Sonata in A was wild and occasionally wayward in its bravado. The Schubert, in contrast, was by turns quietly sad and existentially defiant. The silences, into which the music plunges throughout, seemed to heave with anticipation. The low trills of the opening movement growled as if in the distance before swelling into a disquieting roar. The Andante was a lullaby that brought with it only temporary intimations of comfort, while scherzo and finale bristled with spasmodic vitality. Some find Vogt's playing idiosyncratic, and his fondness for dynamic extremes can occasionally seem mannered, but these were interpretations of the highest order.