Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall, London

For this recital, Mitsuko Uchida allowed herself no hiding places. Her programme consisted of Beethoven's three last piano sonatas, played in numerical order with the perceptive thoughtfulness that characterises everything she plays, and couched in her usual silvery tones and elegant, lyrical phrasing.

Yet Uchida is not first and foremost a Beethoven interpreter. One wouldn't necessarily want to hear her tackle the Hammerklavier Sonata, or even the Appassionata; Sturm und Drang on such an epic scale has never been her speciality. But in the elevated world of these late works, she has no such temperamental problems, and her playing often moved into genuinely inspirational territory.

All three sonatas contained wonderful moments, especially as the recital went on. If any performance was marginally disappointing, it was the account of the E Major Sonata Op 109 with which Uchida began, a work that one might have expected to suit her temperament best of all.

The first movement was delicately rhapsodic, but there were passing moments of rhythmic instability buried in the whirling central Prestissimo, and some rather squarely muscular counterpoint in the final variations. There was, too, a rather thin sound in the piano's highest registers, though that was much more likely to be characteristic of the instrument being used than of Uchida's own touch, which was so even and silken through the rest of the keyboard.

The way in which the end of that sonata evaporated, as if being re-absorbed into silence, was magical; and the special care with which Uchida managed the closing bars of each work was one of her special touches. But every movement contained something special. There was lithe buoyancy in the first movement of Op 110, remarkable, almost static figuration in its scherzo, and a wonderfully poised presentation of the final fugue. Op 111 began with a tightly coiled intensity, packed with a nervous rather than elemental energy that was gradually discharged over the course of the next two movements, spiralling into the musical stratosphere in the final pages of the variations, and wonderfully paced at every stage. Hugely impressive.