Nelson Goerner, Wigmore Hall, London

Fantasy given the full throttle

At 33, Nelson Goerner is one of the most rounded, completely gifted of the younger pianists, which with so much talent around these days is really saying something. So it's hard to give very tangible reasons why his Wigmore recital on Saturday was disappointing – at least, it was until I learnt afterwards that Goerner had a cold and was not feeling well. A singer would probably have cancelled, so if his heart wasn't in it and the lustre we have come to expect from his playing was a bit dulled, he deserves credit for fulfilling a demanding programme as well as he did.

Things didn't seem quite right from the start, for the interlocking semiquavers in Schumann's Arabesque were cramped and didn't quite flow. The ardent first movement of Schumann's Fantasy went much better – it was certainly impulsive and full-throttled, though some of the dreamier sections suffered from the sort of rubato that is more a matter of professional courtesy than a sign of spontaneous feeling.

The programme notes should have numbered the movements to discourage the audience from clapping between them – they obviously thought the work had three endings. Goerner took the central march daringly fast, but managed the final jumps with only one smudge. No lack of energy there, though in the serene final movement he again substituted professional artfulness for real feeling, and the magic was lost.

After the interval there was a considerable imaginative leap to the world of late Debussy and his second book of Studies. Some of these pieces focus on a technical challenge, such as repeated notes or arpeggios, but the more you hear them, the more strongly their expressive content makes itself felt.

Goerner is a very quiet player to look at – his face gives nothing away – yet these were very warm and poetic performances. He is also quite tiny, almost fragile in stature – yet his technique is big and strong, and in the final Study for chords separated by treacherous jumps, there was no sign of struggle, but just an appropriate degree of rhythmic license to give a rugged impression.

He had plenty of strength left, too, for the teeming textures of Stravinsky's Petrushka. And yet the effect here was opaque, as if he weren't quite listening to himself, or had lost sight of the music's colourful imagery. The central movement had very little character at all. Still, he delivered the goods as far as the bare notes went, and with them flying thick and fast by the end, cheers were inevitable.

Goerner was accordingly generous with encores, and played Rachmaninov's G major Prelude very nicely, followed by a fast and furious Sonata by Scarlatti (a study, in effect, for rapid repeated notes), and then a real bonbon, Feliks Blumenfeld's haunting Study for the Left Hand. It may seem mean to criticise such mastery of a technical feat, but it could have done with a deal more charm.