It is 12 years since I last heard Evgeny Kissin give a recital, and going to hear him again – in a programme of Schubert and Scriabin – was a triumph for hope over experience: the hope that the apparently boundless potential that Kissin displayed when he first played in Britain as a teenager in the late 1980s might have matured into something genuinely profound, and that the brittle brilliance of his technique might be underpinned by real musical insights.

Kissin is in his 40s now, but on this evidence his playing has not moved on at all. His technique is apparently as immaculate as it ever was; even the most challenging passages in a selection of Scriabin's Op 8 Etudes seemed hardly to stretch him, and the bravura flourishes of the opening movement of Schubert's D major Sonata D850 caused no problems either. Yet the sound is monochrome and what is still missing is any sense of a bigger musical picture. It's all surface, with details carefully rendered, and extremes avoided – there are no great climaxes, nor melting pianissimos. The emotional map of the Schubert sonata was hard to discern – the yearning second theme of the slow movement had no flavour at all; the wit and charm of the last movement was all but obliterated.

The most impressive moments came in the Scriabin, though even here, the crucial modulation into the major key in the first movement of the Second Piano Sonata in G sharp minor Op 19 passed almost unnoticed, and its presto finale wasn't quite the force of nature it ought to be. Right at the end, two of the more turbulent Op 8 Etudes, No 9 in G sharp minor, and No 12 in D sharp minor, were captured more convincingly, but that was about all.