Artur Pizarro, St John's, Smith Square<br></br>Imogen Cooper, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Artur Pizarro, first prizewinner at the Leeds Piano Competition in 1990, is the proverbial catcher of trains – a man in a hurry – with fingers, rather than legs, that sometimes run ahead of musical sense. Several of his tempi on his new CD of four Beethoven Sonatas are very fast indeed, and in the opening recital of his Beethoven's Sonata cycle he took the finale of the "Pathétique" at something closer to Presto than Allegro. The cycle itself will be more leisurely, with eight recitals, all broadcast on BBC Radio 3, stretching over the coming 12 months.

Not too much need be read into Beethoven's very first Sonata, and for Pizarro it was a doddle – bright and clean, with the slow movement gracefully natural. The gravity some pianists bring to the middle movement of the "Pathétique" was absent, and perhaps it wasn't missed. But there was more to enjoy in the teasing humour of the G major Sonata Op 14/2 and the beginnings of a broader vision in the B flat Sonata Op 22 that followed, though Pizarro's rubato at the start of the slow movement seemed a bit lavishly imposed, like a self-advertisement. Pizarro is certainly reliable, capable, even brilliant, but how responsive he is to Beethoven's most searching explorations remains to be heard.

His second programme coincided with Imogen Cooper's recital in the South Bank's piano series. A former pupil of Alfred Brendel, Cooper favours a similar repertoire of the great Austro-German classics. But her character as a player is quite different – equally serious but more gentle. In Schubert's A major Sonata D959, her lack of sheer physical strength hardly seemed a limitation because she compensated with a philosophical warmth and a wealth of delicate expressiveness. The slow second movement was most subtly shaped, so that it seemed to be dragging itself along under the burden of great sorrow, yet without becoming bogged down. Her lightness in the finale of the D major Sonata D850 transformed what can seem trite and tedious into something of delicate delight. Her brave, brisk tempo in the first movement made for a buoyant and exhilarating journey, if almost breathless and bewildering in the central excursion.

Prefacing each Sonata was a set of Variations – Beethoven's on a theme by Salieri, all entertaining inventiveness, which Cooper revelled in, and Haydn's more reflective F minor Variations, whose sobre, elegiac character was intimately rendered until the brief, bold efflorescence shortly before the end.

This concert is broadcast on Thursday on BBC Radio 3 at 7.30pm. The next two concerts in the Beethoven Sonatas series will be on 14 and 21 May