Since winning prizes at the 2010 Chopin competition, Ingolf Wunder has established himself as a force to be reckoned with. This latest appearance in the Southbank international piano series didn’t quite live up to his first, but there was undoubtedly magic alongside the occasional misfire.

Was it wise to start with Schubert’s final sonata, D960 in B flat major? Perhaps not, given Wunder’s evident discomfort in its opening movement: the tempo was unsettled, the pedalling clumsy and that ominous left-hand trill strangely awkward. But then the strangeness began to beguile. The slow movement brought sudden, breathtaking stillness – far removed from the agitated phrasing of the first. Elsewhere, thunderous climaxes emerged and subsided in an instant, while Wunder constantly sought new soundworlds.

In the second half, Wunder launched into Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor, K397 almost before sitting down, and it was over in a single, hyper-Romantic flash. His Adagio in B minor, K540 was similarly unfashionable in these historically informed times, indulging equally in unrestrained rubato and a propensity for deep left-hand excavations.

Then there was Chopin, to which Wunder brought a different degree of authority. His Polonaise-Fantaisie (for which he won the prize in Warsaw) retained a feeling of energetic improvisation, but its many voices were sculpted into a coherent, persuasive whole. The A-flat major Polonaise was undeniably virtuosic, while making space for introspection in moments at which time slowed. At the end of a wild, exhilarating journey into musical terra nova, this felt unmistakably like home.