There's a weird paradox about Maxim Vengerov's playing. Every phrase is freighted with an unmistakable expressivity and intensity, just as in the first theme of Brahms's Third Violin Sonata, which he played in his latest Barbican recital. In just four bars he created a kaleidoscopic variety of tone and tempo, and conjured a breathless emotional world, all accompanied by an elaborate ballet of physical gestures and facial gestures.

Watching him is an intoxicating experience. But hearing him over the course of the four movements of the Brahms sonata was less than compelling. He made every gesture carry such a heavy load that the effect of his whole performance was curiously inexpressive.

The structure of the music collapsed under the enormous emotional burden that Vengerov made it bear: he transformed the delicate lament of the slow movement into a massive, tragic peroration, and the ghost of a scherzo became a grotesque, grimacing spectre. Living so completely in the moment of the music, Vengerov and his equally flamboyant partner, pianist Fazil Say, created some thrillingly noisy passages in the finale, but they made the piece a vehicle for their technical brilliance rather than a convincing musical experience.

It's precisely his expressive immediacy that makes Vengerov such a compelling concerto soloist and encore specialist, but it also makes him limited as a recitalist, when every note and gesture becomes a musical hyperbole. However, when he allies his emotional conviction with a sense of architecture and form, the result can be spectacular. He played Bach's D minor solo Partita (on a modern instrument, rather than the baroque violin he has recently been experimenting with in this repertoire) in a performance that grew inexorably from the concentration of the opening Allemande to the contrapuntal splendour of the final Chaconne.