Alexei Nabioulin, Wigmore Hall, London <br></br>Lukas Vondracek, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

How to alienate audiences

Winners of piano competitions are those who offend least, it's sometimes said. But since the triennial Dublin Piano Competition started in 1988, it has come up with more interesting laureates than Alexei Nabioulin, the most recent. No prize for the old-fashioned programme he chose for his London debut, trawling 200 years of keyboard history as if to show that every composer, from Handel to Prokofiev, could be played the same way. Nabioulin's lack of personality, his inability to reach out to an audience, really told in two Beethoven sonatas, Op 10 No 2 and Op 27 No 1. As two of the less popular of the 32, they were an enterprising choice, but Nabioulin failed to give them life: he made them merely neat, very fast, as well as cold and brittle. One expected more excitement from a Russian-trained pianist in Prokofiev's Eighth Sonata, but Nabioulin's air of getting through the evening with minimum delay suggested that he did not really enjoy playing for an audience.

Lukas Vondracek, also making his London debut, certainly did, though he took time to establish his strong points. Just 16, he seemed in much of his programme to be reproducing what he had prepared rather than recreating it spontaneously. Smetana's At the Seashore and Macbeth and the Witches were as if viewed under a microscope, though expertly controlled. Vondracek failed to make magic with Janacek's In the Mists, which requires an emotional maturity and the sort of imaginative leap for which he is, as yet, not equipped. A year ago, in the same hall, Lars Vogt showed what a really inspired player can do with this music.

But Vondracek came alive in the Toccata that closes Debussy's Pour le Piano; it was brilliant, grand and beautifully shaped. Still better were three of Liszt's Transcendental Studies, though in "Ricordanza" it was the decorative bits that dazzled; the main melody seemed contrived.

His first encore, a Toccata by Slavicky, gobbled up a great many notes and demanded digital efficiency rather than searching artistry. In Gluck's Dance of the Blessed Spirits, he suggested rather too much calculation, though he shaped and coloured the music in a sophisticated fashion. It certainly lodged in the memory.