The Wigmore Hall was almost full (mostly with trumpeters, I'd guess) for Hakan Hardenberger's recital with pianist Roland Pöntinen - a reminder that there is no instrumentalist around today who dominates his instrument more completely and that all the major trumpet works of the past two decades have been composed for his astonishing virtuosity.

There was plenty of that fabulous technique on show here - double and triple tonguing of superhuman speed and clarity, chromatic scales of bewildering evenness - and at times one doubted whether Hardenberger really was playing an instrument with just three valves. But musically the rewards of the evening were more meagre, with only works by Maxwell Davies and Ligeti having any claims to real substance.

Anyone who has dreamed of hearing Bellini's Casta Diva played on the trumpet, though, would have had their prayers answered when Hardenberger played Jean-Baptiste Arban's Fantasia on Norma, the usual emptily rhetorical 19th-century display piece. There were more bits of Frenchified fluff from Marcel Bitsch and Florent Schmitt, and just fluff from Martinu and Shchedrin. Pöntinen dutifully bulked out the programme with some solo piano pieces - four Scarlatti sonatas, two numbers from Janacek's On an Overgrown Path, and El Polo from Albeniz's Iberia - without ever suggesting that he was doing anything more than filling in time.

Both had more to do in Maxwell Davies's gritty, rigorous Trumpet Sonata, his official Op 1. It was written for Elgar Howarth (then a trumpeter) and John Ogdon, and Howarth was also responsible for the arrangement of Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre, which takes three coloratura arias from his opera Le Grand Macabre and turns them into an exhilarating party piece for trumpet and piano. Pöntinen provided the backdrop of taps, whistles and whispers as well as the occasional keyboard commentary, while Hardenberger's playing see-sawed between the brilliant and the scarcely credible.