Eduardo Monteiro / Bobby Chen, Wigmore Hall, London

How deceiving biographies can be! The Brazilian pianist Eduardo Monteiro had some of the most distinguished teachers in the world, in France, Italy and the US. He has been a finalist in the Dublin and Santander piano competitions. He has performed with well-known Russian and German orchestras. You would think, from all that, that he was a pianist with some guts, at least. It took a little while to discover his limitations, but once sussed, they became ever more apparent.

Monteiro started Brahms's Op 10 Ballades promisingly – very relaxed, with a light touch and little pedal, not solid or grave enough for this music, perhaps, yet attractively unusual. The middle section was certainly not sufficiently sonorous, and this was again the problem in the second Ballade. With the third and fourth, it became clear that Monteiro's playing lacked solidity as well as weight, and failed to grip the listener's attention.

A 15-minute piece called Celestial Charts, by Almeida Prado, a compatriot born in 1943, probably didn't need these qualities. It was an impressionistic evocation originally commissioned for a multimedia show in a planetarium – very pretty with its clusters, tremolos and glittering constellations of notes scattered the entire length of the keyboard, but music of rather obvious effects.

But the first three pieces of Albeniz's Iberia were, frankly, beyond this pianist: I never thought to hear Albeniz sound insipid and weak, and Monteiro ran out of steam almost as soon as he started. Why, then, did he choose to end with Prokofiev's dynamic Eighth Sonata? He clearly had no stomach for it, for his sense of rhythm was flaccid and dynamic range small. It was so boring, it felt endless.

The Malaysian-born Bobby Chen, ex-Menuhin School and Royal Academy, is still studying with Hamish Milne. The impression left by his recital was of a technically gifted student who still has to reach that star beyond all the others: imagination. His programme already said a lot about him, because it was planned as a sort of decathlon, with Haydn's C major Sonata thrown in at the beginning to show he could play Classical music stylishly. It was the most satisfying performance in the recital: well-groomed and restrained, though the tempo contrasts in the last movement were extreme.

Chen imported a Kawai grand instead of using one of the Wigmore's Steinways, and though admirably even in its tone, the tuning sounded unconvincing in the complex harmonies of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. Chen played quite elegantly, though with some unfortunately prominent wrong notes, but the real problem was a lack of evocative character. The second piece, "Le gibet", sounded as if he were counting all through, while the first, "Ondine", seemed less like a picture than an abstract study, and the last, "Scarbo", had no sense of mystery or threat.

Finally, Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition had little picturesque character, and Chen did himself no favours by rattling off Chopin's "Minute" Waltz carelessly and following it with Liszt's "Feux follets", without nuances.