There was a time when the first London recital by a winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition would guarantee a full house at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but not any more. For Alessio Bax's recital on Wednesday the auditorium was barely half full. That suggests the allure that used to go with winning at Leeds is not what it was. It also suggests that a competition that for so long has basked in the glory of having "discovered" a whole raft of front-rank pianists in the 1970s - Lupu, Perahia, Uchida, Schiff, Alexeev - has finally been exposed as having no better a track record than any of its rivals when it comes to sifting out the truly talented artists from the seemingly endless supply of efficient keyboard technicians.

To judge by this appearance, I fear that Bax is not going to restore the reputation of the Leeds. The 22-year-old Italian won the 2000 competition last month - a unanimous decision, apparently - playing a Brahms concerto in the final. But whatever qualities made that performance so worthy of the top award were certainly not on show here.

He has a lissom yet sturdy technique, shown off to best advantage in the piano arrangement of Ravel's La Valse, with which he ended his programme. He is also capable of dealing competently with everything that Rachmaninov can throw at him. He was well on top of the Corelli Variations and negotiated a clear path through a group of preludes from the Op 23 set.

Yet these were never characterful performances. The Ravel is dangerous music, teetering on the edge of chaos. But Bax never suggested any risk, and never got to the heart of the Corelli Variations.

Had Bax played these works before tackling a Schubert sonata (the A minor D784) then the unfocused details might have gone unnoticed. But the sonata had come first, and so much of it had been incoherent - the opening Allegro, one of Schubert's rawest tragic statements, had such an unstable pulse the whole momentum of the movement was destroyed. The Andante went for nothing and the elements of the finale lacked any kind of integration. The result of all this was that the same shortcomings seemed magnified through the rest of his programme.

The event was presented as the Yamaha Piano Centenary Concert, and the company had turned half of the QEH foyer into a showroom for the evening. One hopes that the instruments on display there were more impressive than the shallow, wiry-toned example that Bax was contending with in the hall.