Christian Blackshaw, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

A pianist commemorating the 20th anniversary of Sir Clifford Curzon's death with a programme that Curzon himself gave is treading hallowed ground. Christian Blackshaw actually worked with Curzon, and his Park Lane Group recital, opening another South Bank International Piano Series, contained three peaks of the repertoire. Mozart's C minor Sonata, K457, is a grand, passionate work whose stormier aspects were muted in Blackshaw's restrained performance. He took the first movement just a bit too fast for comfort, so that ornamental details seemed pushed rather than natural. But he settled down in the slow movement, which he handled with loving care, as if swaddling it in cotton wool. And even in the finale he restricted his volume, so that despite a surprising opening up in the lower register roughly midway through, its fiery bravura was underplayed.

Blackshaw sat quite close to the keyboard, making gently florid gestures with his arms and hands that drew rather too much attention to his pianistic manners. And he was certainly doing a lot to animate the lower and inner voices in the first movement of Schumann's Fantasy. Yet you didn't feel that impulsive passion was quite natural to him, and he fought shy of a forthright delivery of the top line. The most gripping bits were the dreamy passages, the wistful taperings into silence, and the ending created an enthralling effect.

No surprise, then, that the defiant pride of the central march-like movement was more than a bit modified, and the wickedly difficult jumps at the end of it taken slightly cautiously. But Blackshaw made a lot of the quiet passages and within his subdued level of enthusiasm also orchestrated textures thoughtfully. Best of all was the rapturous sunset of the last movement, whose graduated levels were judged exquisitely.

A melting touch and unflinching control at the quietest levels also made the daunting first movement of Schubert's B flat Sonata something special. Blackshaw shaped the first theme with the subtlest variations of equal note-lengths so that it throbbed with secret life, and the recurring trill in the bass rumbled like distant thunder. (I wasn't so sure, though, about the way he played the trill's termination rather deliberately, almost as if the keys were a bit sticky.)

The slow second movement was taken much more quietly than most pianists dare, as if the sorrows of a world-weary soul had been transmuted into the sublime. The Scherzo was feather-light and luminous – ravishing. The finale was still quite delicate, its rustic background suppressed almost as much as possible: I would have liked more generous feeling in the second subject and more explosive force in the powerful passages. But in all, this was a performance of one of Curzon's favourite works that was worthy of his memory, and that is saying a very great deal.

This recital will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 next month