Elisabeth Leonskaja is most admired for her performances of the 19th-century staples of the Austro-German piano literature, especially Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. But like her great mentor and duet partner Sviatloslav Richter, Leonskaja's interests range far wider than that, and the opening half of her latest London recital was devoted to music from the first decades of the 20th century, with a rarity as its centrepiece: George Enescu's Piano Sonata No 1.

Enescu is one of those neglected composers whose stature seems to increase the less his music is performed, though some of the mystique might be dispelled if, as rumoured, his opera Oedipe finally gets performed here in a couple of years' time. As Leonskaja's typically forthright performance showed, his First Sonata, composed in 1924, is a rangy, imposing work, but it's not particularly distinctive or memorable. The style is generically modernist, mostly a mix of Debussy and Scriabin, with a few tonally wayward harmonies thrown in for good measure, but the ideas themselves are never striking, and the prospect of the music always seems more attractive than anything you actually hear.

Leonskaja framed the sonata with Ravel and Debussy – the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, never sentimental or precious, but wonderfully spontaneous, and a group of three Preludes that never strove for extraneous effect – and after the interval moved on to the territory that she always commands impressively. Brahms's F minor Sonata Op 5 is an archetypal Leonskaja work, ambitious and big boned, and her performance got its measure superbly well. There were some splashy moments, and a few passages that could have been sleeker or more refined, but the sheer fluency of the playing and the simple, unaffected directness of its lyrical moments were what really mattered.

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