Seong-Jin Cho made his British debut with the Philharmonia last November, less than a month after he took first prize in the 2015 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. Then he played the work with which he had won that competition, Chopin’s E minor Concerto, and for this first London recital the programme was all-Chopin too.

We will have to wait, then, to discover whether Cho is more than a one-trick pony, and whether the virtues of his Chopin playing transfer convincingly to other composers. Much of what he offered here confirmed was what the Philharmonia concerto performance and the disc released of his Warsaw performances suggested: that he is still a work-in-progress, a pianist who needs to be given the time to round out his musical personality and find the interpretative ideas to match his undeniable technical prowess.

There are already moments in Cho’s performances that have a sense of something really special. In this recital, the first of them came at the end of the F minor Fantasy, when the music seemed to be suspended in mid-air on a gossamer thread of sound; the Four Mazurkas, Op 33 too seemed to inhabit a world that Cho had imagined just for them. But the bigger, public works – the A flat Polonaise, Op 53, the second Ballade, and the B flat minor Scherzo – were generalised and much less involving. Though they were technically brilliant, it was hard to work out just what was guiding the flashing fingers, any more than it was possible to sense what Cho really thinks the B flat minor Sonata is all about; music that Chopin himself described as “a few of my wildest children” seemed almost matter of fact here.

A Bach sarabande and a Schubert impromptu were the encores. When we get the chance to hear Cho in more of such music, and perhaps in a Beethoven sonata or some Debussy preludes, there might be a better sense of where he really is and where he might go.