IN CONCERT / On hands and feet: Adrian Jack reviews three of the week's major console and keyboard recitals in London

The new organ at St John's Smith Square has a problem. Hearing Gillian Weir play it last month and then the Norwegian Jon Laukvik last Thursday, it seems clear that the pedal division speaks with a considerable time lag. How Laukvik managed to play Bach's nimble Trio Sonata in G I don't know, because it would have taxed all but the split mind. He still made a fairly good job of it, and it probably wasn't his fault that the slow movement, with its throbbing bass line, sounded a bit stodgy.

Yet we cannot blame the builder, Johannes Klais of Bonn, if the instrument lacks a certain degree of character, because he was asked to make it as near all things to all music as possible. Laukvik explored the Klais's potential for the raw, crisp sounds of Baroque music, did a fair imitation of a vacuum cleaner in some Brahms chorale settings, and ended with flashy thunderbolts in his own Triptychon.

It was fun to watch his fingers (on the hall's large video screen) hopping like squirrels over all three manuals. But his idea of phrasing and melodic flow was distinctly arthritic. He evidently belongs to the school which thinks that to be 'musical' you have to make the pulse lop-sided and bend rhythms so that they're crooked and quaint. In Bach's majestic Dorian Toccata and Fugue I wished he would cut the mannerisms and just get on with it.

Ricardo Castro is the 29-year-old Brazilian pianist who is enjoying the mixed blessings of having beaten Leon McCawley to the first prize in this year's Leeds Competition. Most people seem to have thought his Emperor Concerto in the finals on the dull side, and I found my attention drifting a few minutes into nearly every one of the pieces he played at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday afternoon. He delivered Mozart's F major Sonata, K332, and A minor Rondo with smart address and polish, keeping both well within the bounds of good manners and avoiding the temptation to linger over the Rondo's melancholy explorations. He didn't expand much in Schubert's haunting A minor Sonata, D784, which has a power and depth of feeling that he either ignored or never suspected, and in Chopin's G minor Ballade he sounded distinctly underpowered. Musical, well-groomed but shallow, I'd have said, were it not for some exquisite playing in Debussy's Cloches a travers les feuilles and Poissons d'or, in which he riveted attention with fabulously exact nuances in soft playing and a sharp sense of rhythmic shaping. Still, I don't know that even this kind of refinement would sustain a whole recital.

Promotion for the American, Frederic Chiu, who made his Wigmore debut on Monday, traded on his reclame as a refuse in the Van Cliburn Competition this summer. His big technique and boundless energy should have served him well, you might have thought, though I find it easy to imagine more spiritual playing. Not that Liszt's transcription of the William Tell overture, a bustling sonata by the teenage Mendelssohn or Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije suite and Sixth Sonata called for the expressive range and depths of Castro's programme. Chiu made the Prokofiev Sonata powerful, brilliant and as clean as a whistle, but there are stranger, more interesting aspects in it to explore, and his second encore, the glittering Schulz-Evler paraphrase of the Blue Danube waltz, seemed the level on which he was happiest.