In the decades after the second world war Elisabeth Lutyens wrote the most challenging and uncompromising music of any British composer of her time. But little of it is heard nowadays, and even the upsurge in interest in 20th-century female composers has hardly furthered her cause. Underlining the neglect of Lutyens’s music since her death, in 1983, Nicolas Hodges began his recital with the world premiere of her Five Impromptus Op 116, which were composed in 1977 for the Australian pianist Roger Woodward but which he seems never to have performed.

The impromptus are typically supple, gritty miniatures, notated without bar lines to emphasise their rhythmic freedom, and only occasionally touching down on solid tonal ground. The sequence perhaps traces the shape of a compressed sonata, with a discursive opening movement of accelerations and slowings-down, and a brief succession of quiet chords functioning as a central slow episode. But nothing is wasted and every gesture is pared down to its functional minimum.

Interspersed with three late Liszt pieces and some early Brahms, there were two more premieres in Hodges’s programme: the first British performances of pieces written for him by James Clarke and Hans Thomalla, both of which examine, in very different ways, the function of virtuosity in contemporary piano music. In Clarke’s Untitled No 7, ecstatic high-register bravura writing is the goal towards which the whole piece aspires, while in Thomalla’s Ballade.Rauschen, fast, undifferentiated figuration and explosive clusters prove to be the way of overcoming rigour and thematicism, and of escaping from the disconcerting recollections of earlier music that emerge during the 20-minute piece. Each work presents huge technical challenges, which Hodges, typically, met with cool command.