With some pianists you feel that Bach is included in the programme more as a moral obligation than anything else. For Murray Perahia, however, the unfolding of contrapuntal lines (“voice-leading”, as it is sometimes called) is central to his thinking. Bach’s Partita No 1 in B flat demonstrated the subtlety with which he handles the process, maintaining a close rapport, as he does so, with Baroque style.

His pearly tone and undemonstrative musical demeanour were also heard to good effect in Mozart’s F major Sonata, K 332. But if already there may not have been enough that was distinctive and individual for some tastes, such a failing was all the more evident in Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.

Again, Perahia’s technical control was sovereign but where was the sense of boundaries being stretched, of the medium being battered by Beethoven’s inordinate demands, above all of the blazing intensity that gave the sonata its nickname?

At last in Brahms’s Handel Variations came the magic one longed to hear. You know Perahia will leap lightly over Brahms’s formidable technical hurdles, and it was good to have each variation so strongly characterised, whether poetic reverie, dancing siciliana or brilliant virtuoso display. But here, too, were those personal touches that raise a reading to greatness.

A pair of Schubert Impromptus, miraculously executed, returned Perahia to his comfort zone.