Stanislav Ioudenitch, Goldsmiths' Hall, London

City Music Society puts on 20 public lunchtime concerts a year at the Bishopsgate Institute, and six early-evening concerts (members only) at Goldsmiths' Hall. The heavily luxurious premises of the latter score highly for their sense of importance, but the great room in which concerts are held is not friendly to a pianist. The hall's own piano is a "C" model Steinway, one size down from a full concert grand. It's only a few years old, nothing for a good piano, but its sustaining power is soaked up by the expensive carpet and curtains. It probably needs a lot more playing-in than it has had, and Stanislav Ioudenitch, the Uzbek joint winner of the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition in Texas, had a hard time of it last Wednesday.

He played Mozart's D-minor Fantasy with a kind of contained romanticism, just right for music which runs the gamut of expression through pathos, grandeur, to decisive sprightliness. Yet it felt like hard work. Mozart's popular A-minor Sonata, one of his most nakedly emotional, also exercised Ioudenitch's powers of persuasion, though if the first movement felt driven to the point of breathlessness, that wasn't altogether against its nature. The middle movement showed up the piano's reluctance to sing, or the room's unco-operative response, and all the pianist's eloquence seemed to fall on stony ground. In the finale, Ioudenitch moved his body about much more than you'd think necessary in any piece by Mozart: the flesh was perhaps more willing than the spirit.

But all this was nothing compared with the athletic exertion needed in Stravinsky's Petrouchka. Stravinsky may have composed it on an exhausted old upright, but a performance needs to ring out on the biggest grand possible. Ioudenitch certainly got round the notes, and he also got the angular stiffness of the puppets' gestures from the original ballet, but it was also obvious that he wasn't achieving the pigmentation of tone he was after, nor the sheer weight or richness of sound. He did, however, get some laughs from the audience at the end of the first dance. In the circumstances, it was a brave effort.

Ioudenitch certainly won't forget London in a hurry, for after all the tuner's hard work on the piano during the interval, Schubert's late, great A-major Sonata had to compete with scaffolders on a nearby building site. At least the audience was silent. Not a cough, nor even a sniffle was heard, which says something for the sense of commitment Ioudenitch put across. Despite the thankless acoustic, he didn't pull the music about too much by way of compensation. There was everything right about this performance except for the sense that the music itself was travelling under its own momentum, which was lacking. At another time, in another place, it might all come together.