Evgeny Kissin, Royal Festival Hall, London

Schubert's B flat Sonata is burdened with the baleful tag of "valediction", because it's the last he finished. That was how Evgeny Kissin played it, though, paradoxically, he chose it to open his recital.

He took the first movement with such laboured emphasis that one note hardly connected with the next. Instead of serenity, the mood seemed more like agony. Nor did he sustain the second movement well – it was dry, and too slow, surely, for the marked "Moderato".

When, in the Scherzo, the spirit should have lightened, we got playing in strict time, perfunctory and without charm. The final movement was hard-driven, its stormy episode as explosive as anyone has ever made it. It was as if Schubert had not so much been bid farewell to as roughed up and left for dead.

With Schubert transcribed by Liszt, Kissin was much more sure. Liszt enlarged Schubert's beguiling "Ständchen" into something luxuriously opulent, and Kissin filled its overblown textures amply. After "Das Wandern" and "Wohin?", both glittering, he came into his element most fully with "Aufenthalt", which was all smouldering passion.

Kissin delivered the ornamental digressions of Liszt's Petrarch Sonnet 104 as if his life depended on them, then gave us the full force of his armoury in Liszt's First Mephisto Waltz. It was not all pounding bravura; there was nonchalant elegance, too. But what really amazed was the accuracy and clarity of his playing under extreme pressure.

Kissin's first encore was like a belated postscript to the earlier Sonata – he played Schubert's G flat Impromptu. And though it was deliberately slow and loosely shaped, it was also captivating, even if he whipped its most turbulent passage briefly into excessive drama. The third encore, Liszt's Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody, was exuberant and overwhelmingly powerful.