Ronald Smith, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

Ronald Smith is the Alkan man – the pianist who pioneered the revival of this dark and dazzling pianist-composer, Chopin's neighbour in Paris, who famously died beneath a toppled bookcase. Smith also wrote a definitive study of the man and his music, which is still in print.

Smith's 80th birthday recital last Monday was a half-hour longer than your average programme, yet when he introduced the last few items – by Alkan, naturally – he put heart into us all with his charm and humour. He must be a champion after-dinner speaker.

Nor did his playing run out of juice, though when he began the evening with Schubert's gruelling Wanderer Fantasy, it was immediately obvious he couldn't command the sonority he once did. He sat unusually low at the piano, his elbows actually lower than the keyboard, wrists very loose, so that his lanky fingers reached over the keys like the legs of a spider. But if his tone was subdued, one adjusted to it, and his sense of timing and the way he shaped and separated paragraphs, were assured. Besides, his refusal to press himself beyond his reserves of strength allowed the music to breathe. If you heard Smith on Radio 3's In Tune a few days earlier, you might have feared the worst before his performance of the whole set of Chopin's Op 25 Studies. The QEH evidently gave him a lift that the BBC studio hadn't, and he rose to the occasion. Smith has always had a certain detachment as a player, to the point of appearing matter- of-fact. Yet he never made these poetic pieces sound like technical exercises, and his relaxed phrasing and singing highlights offered moments of eloquent poetry.

Not content with two Everests of the pianist's repertoire, Smith went on after the interval to tackle Beethoven's Op 111 Sonata. Though tackle is not quite the word for a player of such long experience. It began extremely well: clean and decisive. Again, as in Schubert earlier, Smith didn't push his tone, but maintained his concentration in the rugged mental struggle of the first movement. His simplicity and singing quality in the variations of the second movement won their case, and if, at the momentous point when the two hands are at the keyboard's extremities, he created less tension than he should, his perfect trills were a joy to relish.

Two of Alkan's most evocative short pieces, "Le tambour bat aux champs" and "La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer" – described with a few well-chosen words beforehand – didn't quite finish the evening, because Smith took us for a hair-raising ride through Alkan's Octave Study, Op 35, and then added another Alkan Prelude and Chopin's "Black-key" Study as a thank-you for a bunch of flowers so big he could hardly carry it off the platform.