Each year the programme of City of London festival takes as its theme the culture of one of the countries with which the city maintains strong trading links. This time it is Japan, and the early-evening programme by pianist Noriko Ogawa qualified twice over; not only is Ogawa Japanese by birth (she made her name in the west when she was a prizewinner at the Leeds Piano Competition in 1987), but her programme was made up of works with Japanese connections.

Some of those connections were more obvious than others. Two short pieces from the turn of the 20th century by Rentaro Taki - one rather Schubertian, the other owing more to Schumann and Chopin - are claimed to be the earliest Japanese works for piano. Meanwhile, Takemitsu's two pieces, Les Yeux Clos, full of impressionist washes and delicate, crystalline detail, represented the most important Japanese composer to write in the western tradition. Poissons d'Or, the last piece in the second book of Debussy's Images, was inspired by some Japanese lacquer work, while Ogawa included Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata, she explained, because the composer visited the country en route to the US, and quoted from songs he heard there in his Third Piano Concerto.

Ogawa played all these pieces with her familiar sharp-focused intensity, presenting Debussy's textures with limpid exactness, if just occasionally a bit too much literalness. There was a new piece, too - Returning, by Japanese-born, British-resident Dai Fujikura. But that turned out to be more a sketch than a self-sufficient work in its own right, part of the preparation for a piano concerto Fujikura is writing for Ogawa, scheduled for performance in 2008.

· The City of London festival continues until July 13. Box office: 0845 1207502.