Angela Hewitt's burgeoning reputation, enough to ensure the Wigmore Hall was packed with fans for this recital, is founded on performances of Bach, both in recital and on disc, and his music still forms the bedrock of her programmes. For this appearance two of the keyboard partitas were paired with two of Beethoven's piano sonatas, the C minor partita prefacing the E flat sonata Op 7, and the D major placed before Beethoven's Op 27 no 2 in C sharp minor, the Moonlight.

However, none of the performances was convincing. If Bach is the foundation for Hewitt's programmes, then her Bach playing is a good indicator of the state of pianism, and the imperfections in both the partitas were symptomatic of the more fundamental problems that appeared in both the Beethoven sonatas. There was the familiar bright, forward tone and the usual muscular clarity to the part-writing, but prissy correctness was no substitute for natural phrasing and there were too many moments when the pulse wavered alarmingly.

Yet both partitas were far more impressive than either of the Beethoven sonatas. Op 7 is the grandest of the early sonatas, a work of vast emotional range and self-propelling energy built around a searching slow movement. Hewitt, though, never came close to measuring its scale or to exploring the profoundities of that great Largo. This was Beethoven cut down to the size of one of his contemporaries, as if this great work had been composed by Clementi or Hummel. The Moonlight was no more convincing - nothing magical or mysterious about the opening movement, nothing witty or unexpected in the central minuet, and though the fingerwork in the finale was neat enough, it did not convey any of the music's passion, or its furious tragedy.