Suite No 2 in F - Handel

Adagio in B minor - Mozart

Gigue in G, K574 - Mozart

Sonata in E minor, Op 90 - Beethoven

Hungarian Rhapsody No 13 - Liszt

Three Impromptus, D935 Nos 13 - Schubert

Valse oubliee No 1 - Liszt

Soirees de Vienne No 6 - Liszt

Three movements from Petrushka

Alexei Nabioulin, the popular winner of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition last May, chose an unusual programme for his post-competition Dublin recital debut at the National Concert Hall on Monday.

The most likely intention behind the programme would seem to have been to show the talented young Russian in as many different guises as possible.

He opened with a keyboard suite by Handel (a real rarity in piano recitals these days) and worked his way through two highly-contrasted pieces by Mozart, one of the lesser of Beethoven's later sonatas and a selection of Liszt and Schubert (as well as Schubert seen through the eyes of Liszt), before signing off with the pianistic tour de force which is Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka.

The expected contrasts and necessary strength of characterisation, however, didn't materialise at all consistently during the evening.

Nabioulin traded too strongly on the easy grace of his fingerwork and rarely seemed anxious about what lay beneath the mostly well-groomed surfaces which he presented.

This failing seemed particularly regrettable in music as probing as Mozart's Adagio in B minor and the first of Schubert's second set of impromptus.

Indeed, the three Schubert impromptus were subjected to a severe and debilitating curtailment of repeats in order to be fitted into the programme in the first place.

The fluidity of Nabioulin's pianistic mechanism was, sadly, not reflected in the quality of the music-making.

The rubato often hiccuped, albeit gently, the highlighting of primary melodies and occasional inner voices tended to cast the rest of the texture into undifferentiated shadow, and the general effect was of playing that was clean but emotionally distant.

The two halves of the concert - a journey from Handel to Liszt, followed by another from Schubert to Stravinsky - functioned more as self-contained spans than as parts of a whole.

Within those spans, it was the works with the most to offer in the way of fireworks - Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody and the Stravinsky - which offered the greatest rewards.

Indeed, it was only in Stravinsky's technically-daunting kaleidoscopic fairground melee that one was at all reminded of the qualities that captured the top prize for Nabioulin less than 12 months ago.

For most of this recital he failed to live up to the standards he set then.