"One last salute to Mozart before saying farewell to 2006," is how Louis Lortie described his recital in a programme note. The salute was unusual, however, in that Lortie elected to view Mozart through Romantic eyes, flanking his music with works by Chopin and Liszt that were Mozart tributes in their turn.

Don Giovanni, with its mix of sensual insistence and existential defiance, mapped on to the Byronic imagination of the 19th century. Chopin's Variations on La Ci Darem la Mano and Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan take it as their starting point, re-imagining Mozart as dreamer and poseur respectively.

Lortie was electrifying in both. Chopin's Variations, written when the composer was 17, mark his burgeoning compositional maturity. Lortie's treatment of the introduction, fluid and glimmering, brought with it intimations of the later Nocturnes, while the closing polonaise was all fiery dexterity and hauteur.

The Liszt, meanwhile, was staggering. The piece trades on the composer's reputation as both seducer and Faustian virtuoso, with the Commendatore's hellish pronouncements harrying the extravagant transformations of the Don's music at every turn. Lortie played like one possessed, as the audience gawped, gasped, and called for more.

Lortie's Mozart, in contrast, is austere, though toughness and revelations of harmonic disturbance lurk beneath its surface. The plunging cadenza of the D minor Fantasia K397 tore apart the fragile 18th-century apparatus of the rest of the work, while the slide into dissonance at the centre of the B flat Sonata K333 seemed like a prophecy of the harmonic experiments that dominated music for a century to come.