John Lill, Royal Festival Hall, London

Taking on soundbite culture

John Lill's written preface to his Festival Hall recital criticised the sound-bite culture and called for a collective push for the return of long-term thought. His programme and his playing said it even more eloquently. Lill is nothing if not a decisive pianist – even a stern one – and his way with Haydn's late E flat major Sonata was unflinchingly grand, his tone unforced yet impressively rich in the slightly inhospitable acoustic. He had no problem with projection. Haydn wrote more than 50 piano sonatas, but the E flat major is one of only a few that are well known.

Lill's second work was less expected, for Schumann's Humoreske has long been comparatively neglected, and Lill added it to his repertoire only recently. It's rather like a cycle of shorter episodes, which keep referring back to themselves but, overall, follow a course that twists and turns unpredictably. Lill took the opening so deliberately, it felt almost like slow practising, and a singing topline could hardly be sustained naturally. But he geared the subsequent sections accordingly, so there was no need to gabble the fastest of them, and as the piece unfolded, a clear sense of forward planning emerged.

Perhaps it wasn't the spirit in which the impulsive, inspirational Schumann conceived it, for the work's poignancy lies in its wasted opportunities, its sense of beauty's evanescence; but it was a satisfying, strong and serious view of the music.

It was good, too, to hear one of the less-often-played Beethoven sonatas, for each marks out its own territory, while none deserves to become as hackneyed as the last three. Op 54 begins with a dryly humorous movement baldly opposing two ideas, though Lill made the first rather too bold. That movement is followed by a compositional tour de force: a rich harmonic stream in constant rippling motion, which Lill sustained with quiet certainty beneath beguiling shadings of tone.

That was a refreshing choice before the final warhorse – Liszt's B minor Sonata. It's almost something one cannot imagine never having existed, though I know music-lovers who loathe it. It's also a test of a pianist's character, for although the half-hour journey is brilliantly planned, it can easily become, in the wrong hands, a series of diversions. Lill has the chops for the heavy stuff, but he didn't show off, never pushing the volume. Nor was he seduced by the sensuous appeal, though the graceful transformation of the dactylic motto was stylish, and touching when it came back in the recapitulation. The sham fugue began lightly, though not caricatured as something mischievous; there was no room for that sort of effect-making in this performance. It was deeply serious.

Perhaps it was fitting, then, that the audience's response was sober rather than wild – but such a fine recital deserved a noisier show of appreciation.