The second half of Paul Lewis's Wigmore recital was a reprise of the second half of his much-admired Edinburgh festival recital, a seamless transition, with no intervening applause, from Schubert's German Dances D 820 to Liszt's B minor Sonata, via the Six Little Pieces of Schoenberg's Op 19.

It was delivered with no self-consciousness, but not much revelation either. Whatever connections Lewis was trying to make between the works, no new light was shed on them and no unexpected kinships were revealed. On the contrary, the individuality of each was pretty efficiently suffocated.

The Schoenberg pieces were the most serious casualties. A series of exquisitely shaped, expressively dense aphorisms were each very discriminatingly played by Lewis, but dissolved into an amorphous continuum by this treatment, as if they had been included just for the shock value of their dose of atonality between Schubert's cheerful diatonicism and Liszt's doomy chromaticism.

Perhaps it would have been more convincing had Lewis's B minor Sonata seemed more authoritative, more epic in its scale. But this was warm-hearted, almost cuddly Liszt, not the mean music machine pitched right in the audience's face that the best performances can deliver. There was no sense of being cast adrift into a turmoil of ever more daring effects; Lewis's playing clung to a life belt, and the result was never interesting.

Lewis had begun the far more convincing first half with more music in B minor: Mozart's late Adagio K540. Everything was in the right place here, every phrase perfectly judged, just as it was in Schumann's Kinderszenen. Schubert's Three Piano Pieces D 946 received sensitive performances, too, the kind of solid musical achievement that made what followed seem more of an aberration.