Barry Douglas, Stationers' Hall / Ironmongers' Hall, London

We live in a world full of fine pianists, but there are not so very many worth listening to playing Beethoven Sonatas. Barry Douglas included one in each of his three lunchtime recitals for the City of London Festival, preceding it with a piece by, or arranged by, Liszt, and followed by a Russian work. His first programme, in Stationers' Hall, near St Paul's Cathedral, began with Liszt's arrangement of the "Liebestod" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. The first stomach-churning chord came as a shock in this bright acoustic, and Douglas filled the room with as much rich tone as it could contain, tracing a line with a sure sense of the long view. A strange choice as an opener, but impressively done.

He had all the measure of Beethoven's Op 109, too, though his playing of it was a lot more physical than you might expect in music generally considered rather spiritual. The impulsive second movement has to be fiery, and was as fiery as ever I heard it. But the first movement was given a particularly strong thrust as well, with its more forceful moments really punchy. The trills in the final variation of the last movement seemed to burst alight and then quickly quench their thirst. It was certainly vivid.

But the immediacy of these relatively intimate surroundings made delicate poetry difficult to achieve in some of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition – in the plaintive lay of "The Old Castle", or in its mysterious "Catacombs" movement. And if articulation of the grotesque recurring motif in "Gnome" seemed a blur, it was certainly not Douglas's fault. He made the most, anyway, of the heavyweight numbers, and in the apotheosis of the finale, achieved a sense of grandeur without strain.

The following day, in Ironmongers' Hall, just south of the Barbican, a slightly smaller audience must have wondered what hit them. After a knock-out performance of Funérailles, one of Liszt's most strongly constructed pieces, their clapping was only a feeble trickle. Douglas deserved much better, and his account of Beethoven's Op 110 Sonata was both immaculate and noble – though the hectic middle section of the second movement, with the left hand crossing over the right, and the two tripping each other up, was as baffling to the ears as ever. Perhaps it's an in-joke for pianists.

But again, the Steinway concert grand was really too big and too brilliant for the hall, so that although it sounded magnificent, its impact was too percussive to hear the music in perspective. Still, it made the right glamorous, gleaming sound in Rachmaninov's six sumptuous Moments Musicaux, and the surging optimism of the final piece, surely, made us all feel a lot younger.