Daniel Grimwood, Wigmore Hall, London<br></br>George-Emmanuel Lazaridis, St James' Church, Piccadilly, London

Everyone knows the "Raindrop" Prelude, and most amateur pianists have read through the epigrammatic slow pieces in Chopin's Opus 28, which express nobility with convenient simplicity. Yet piano recitalists don't programme the whole set very often.

Chopin certainly planned the Preludes as a cycle, not just plotting their 24 different keys systematically but also contrasting their character and mood to stimulate the listener's attention. It's likely that pianists will play individual Preludes, or even a selection, with a different emphasis than that which they would give to a performance of the whole, and it was striking that Daniel Grimwood paced his in sweeping paragraphs, so that some Preludes seemed like a single unbroken gesture, and others, such as the E minor Prelude, which are sometimes weighed down with expression, were light on their feet.

Grimwood was far from void of feeling, but he didn't have to toil to prove it, and his relaxed attitude to rhythm fitted into a total picture, confidently imagined but not forced upon us.

Even more unusual was his programming of Scriabin's 24 Preludes, Opus 11, complete performances of which are mainly confined to CDs. In his programme notes, Grimwood said that, as a student, he had often heard professors describe Scriabin as a "poor man's Chopin". That suggests a pretty elementary level of perception, which is downright shameful in a piano teacher. Scriabin didn't have Chopin's range of character, and in all of his music there's something close to an obsession with unity. But he certainly created a world of his own, and Grimwood quite rightly pointed out that the Opus 11 Preludes form a much smoother cycle than Chopin's, one piece melting into the next.

Whether "all of the disturbing questions raised by Chopin's Preludes earlier in the 19th century find their resolutions in Scriabin's set" is a moot point – there are certainly intriguing refractions of Chopin in Scriabin, and his 14th Prelude is like a rethinking of Chopin's 22nd. In any event, Grimwood was acutely sensitive to both, and entered Scriabin's slightly more rarefied world as if it were perfectly natural.

The most fugitive cycle of romantic character pieces is Schumann's Papillons – butterflies deftly captured by the pianist George-Emmanuel Lazaridis at St James' Church, in London's Piccadilly, in a recital that also included Schumann's Opus 12 Fantasiestücke, Schubert's early A major Sonata, D664, and the Wanderer Fantasy, played with blazing passion as well as accuracy. It would be good to hear this exceptionally talented 23-year-old pianist in a purpose-built concert hall with a somewhat clearer acoustic.