Just six weeks after his recital of Chopin and Debussy at the Royal Festival Hall, Maurizio Pollini was back there with a programme of Beethoven. It contained three of the greatest of the piano sonatas – Tempest, Op 31 no 2; Waldstein, Op 53; and Hammerklavier, Op 106. It is musical territory in which Pollini has always been at his best, his playing most tightly focused and engaged.

That intellectual tautness was also evident at the start this time, in the way the opening movement of Op 31 no 2 was laid out, its drama slightly reined in, its energy fiercely concentrated, and in how the finale carried a surging, remorseless inevitability. Other pianists invest the extraordinary recitatives in the first movement with more pathos and the Adagio with more warmth, but the detached way Pollini presented them was of a piece with the rest of his performance.

After that, however, some of this coherence seemed to leach away. The Waldstein betrayed some loose ends. It was brisk and almost peremptory to begin – the chord that launched the recapitulation was positively explosive. But it became increasingly introspective and just a little untidy, so that one began to puzzle over the tiniest details: wondering whether a note value had been cut short for interpretative reasons, or just through carelessness, or why an inner voice suddenly came into sharp relief.

There was a feeling of not being allowed to see the musical wood for the trees in the Hammerklavier; the focus seemed too close, and the sense of whole movements was hard to grasp. Everything was a bit dogged and, while no truthful performance of this sonata is ever going to be pretty or ingratiating, this seemed a particularly unforgiving one, which remained stolidly earthbound even in the Adagio.

• This article was amended on 4 April. It originally had the headline: "Reigned in drama with bursts of excitement". This has been changed.