When an aspiring pianist announces himself with a programme that begins with Beethoven's A flat Sonata Op 110 and ends with Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka - and tales in Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques and Scriabin's Op 42 Studies along the way - he is certainly making a confident statement. The Russian-born Roustem Saitkoulov is now 29; in Moscow he was a pupil of Elisso Virssaladze and spent much of the 1990s picking up prizes on the European piano competition circuit. His Wigmore recital on Monday was his London debut, neatly coinciding with the release of his CD in EMI's Debut series.
His playing does not lack self-assurance. There was nothing half-hearted about the way he set about the Beethoven or the Etudes Symphoniques; it was take-it-or-leave-it stuff. I would rather have left most of it, or more positively have encouraged Saitkoulov to ponder late Beethoven for a bit longer before exploring it so publicly. After a nicely poised opening, the sonata fell apart, lacking a grasp of structure and any real comprehension of what the music is doing; the scherzo proceeded in disjointed flurries, the finale simply prosaically. There were no insights, original or second hand. The Schumann was equally unprepossessing - confined to a narrow dynamic range between mezzo-forte and fortissimo, and often muddled by over-pedalling.
There were hopes that the Russian second half would be more idiomatic, and Saitkoulov's best playing of the evening did come in a couple of the Scriabin Studies, where he caught the febrile flickering perfectly, though in others he failed to give the floating, Chopin-esque lines full weight.
But even here, and more pertinently in Stravinsky's Four Studies from 1908 - fascinating, rarely heard pre-Firebird pieces - the lack of a grip on tempo and how the speed of one section should relate to another was a serious flaw. In the Petrushka pieces that proved disastrous, as each of these magnificent showpieces was dismembered. One wonders whether Saitkoulov has heard Stravinsky's original orchestral score - had he done so he might have realised that some of the details he consigned to near inaudibility are actually important, and that getting round the notes (which was not convincingly achieved either) is not enough, especially when other considerations of phrasing, texture and coherence are ignored.
