There is nothing attention-seeking about Lars Vogt's piano playing - no hint of preciousness or virtuosity for its own sake. Sometimes, though, his performances are a little bit dull, with moments when admiration for their integrity and musical honesty is not quite enough.

Those were the characteristics that defined the performances at the opposite ends of his Symphony Hall recital. Brahms's Op 117 Intermezzi were beautifully poised and spun from crystalline piano tone (Vogt's sound is unfailingly appealing) but they never really probed beneath the surface. This was Brahms in too serene an old age, just as Vogt's account of Beethoven's last piano sonata, the C minor Op 111, remained earthbound, with its final variations never quite reaching the moment of take off.

The works either side of the interval were far more compelling. Vogt played Schubert's late C minor Sonata (a refreshing choice in itself, rather than the ubiquitous B flat Sonata) with its drama kept strictly in check. The textures were always clear, with the rhetorical grandeur perfectly graded, so that the sonata looked back to classicism rather than posing as a proto-romantic work. Once one had got used to the scale and detachment of the performance, it was full of subtleties (in the slow movement and finale especially) and a sure sense of the musical architecture.

For Janacek's In the Mists, however, Vogt raised the temperature significantly. Occasionally he lost the thread of continuity that needs to be preserved through the maze of tempo changes in each of the four movements, but he plotted the tracks of their thematic transformations unfalteringly. The way in which the real emotional weight was placed on the last movement, brought to an anguished climax and quickly damped down, was perfectly judged. Even if he never flaunts his knowledge, Vogt always manages to find the heartbeat of what he's playing.