Though a few other pianists have started to get some of Ligeti's extraordinary Etudes under their belts, no one plays them with the same authority as Pierre-Laurent Aimard. After all, he became the composer's preferred interpreter. Four years ago Aimard gave an astounding performance of all 18 studies in a recital at the Wigmore Hall; in this Barbican appearance he included six of them, pairing each with studies by 19th- and 20th-century composers from Chopin to Messiaen, creating a sequence of fascinating variety.

Juxtaposing the first of Debussy's Etudes, Pour les Cinq Doigts, alongside Ligeti's seventh, Galamb Borong with its Debussyan gamelan-echoes, was one of the more obvious alignments. Another was combining two of Chopin's F minor studies, Op 25 no 2 and the first of the three Nouvelles Etudes, with Ligeti's No 3 (Touches Bloquées) and No 11 (En Suspens). The hunting horns of Liszt's Paganini study La Chasse chimed nicely with the Fanfares of Ligeti's Fourth Etude, too, but the kinship between one of Rachmaninov's Etudes Tableaux (Op 33 no 5) and Automne à Varsovie, Ligeti's lament for the turmoil in Poland at the end of the 1980s, was a surprise.

Beforehand, he had played Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques. Though this work's classical framework suits Aimard's pianism more than some of Schumann's fantasy-based cycles like Carnaval, there was still something too brusque in his approach. Technically it was fluent, expressively it was a bit tight-lipped. One admired the playing without ever getting carried away.