Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall, London, review:

Mitsuko Uchida performs music by Mozart and Schumann, as part of the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, featuring the world’s greatest pianists

Scaling back: Mitsuko Uchida has mastered the piano’s most simple key (Decca/Justin Pumfrey)

When Artur Schnabel said that Mozart’s piano sonatas were, “Too easy for children and too difficult for adults”, he was talking about simplicity. It takes as much humility as skill to tackle these guileless works, and they don’t come much more ingenuous than the Sonata in C major K545, with its white-note purity and music-box charm.

As a concert opener it’s a clever choice. Before she had reached the first repeat, Mitsuko Uchida had neatly pulled the rug out from under the concept of the virtuoso recital, arguing with every elegantly phrased scale and immaculate cadence that the real skill is in restraint.

But having proved her point, Uchida then relented, and gave us an hour of Schumann (Kreisleriana and the Fantasie in C major) that combined this same technical humility with a new emotional release. Uchida’s Schumann is delicate and full of grace, at its best during moments of simple beauty – the chorale-like coda to Kreisleriana’s “Sehr Rasch”, or the gentle intake of breath that opens the “Sehr langsam”. The heroics were less pronounced, though carefully weighted and controlled here in the glowing central movement of the Fantasie; smudgy dark storm clouds painted with precision at the opening.

To begin and end a recital in C major is to return to the beginning, to the very first scale any beginner learns so painstakingly to play. In Uchida’s hands that simplicity was transfigured – a white key no longer, but something rich, familiar but also infinitely, wonderfully strange.