Not since Irina Plotnikova, the Russian winner of the first Sydney International Piano Competition, played Debussy at Brisbane City Hall In 1979, has this impressionist music sounded as scintillating as it did when Ivan Moravec performed it in his Medici Recital on Sunday night.

It was Debussy played at its most exhilarating, rippling images glistening and supple, yet powerful in the great sonorous structures often obscured in more timid approaches to the work.

Moravec, the fastidious artist, chose his programme with telling virtuosity, the miniature gems of Schumann's Kinderszenen (its most notable Traumerei No 7 was a model of restrained sensitivity), followed by four Brahms piano pieces, four Debussy Preludes from Book 2, and finally the four-movement Sonata in B Flat Minor by Chopin.

They were as well balanced aesthetically as was Moravec's formidable technique in their performance. Without mannerism or affectation, Moravec delivered crisp, clean playing. He graded the dynamic modulations with subtle mastery (particularly the Debussy Preludes) serving the power strokes only when the music demanded it, a connoisseur performance as richly smooth and elegant as time-mellowed wine.

It gave an insight into Moravec's unfussy yet penetrating artistry that had not been so obvious when be played Beethoven's Concerto No. 3 in C Minor with Queensland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Stefan Karpe on Friday night.

In the concerto solo, expression gave way to the group and the instrumental warmth Moravec drew in solo recital was missing.

In spite of broad, commanding gestures, Karpe did not manage to bond the music. It remained a succession of bars and sections instead of a lyrical unified whole, factors which also invaded the two Sibelius works on the longish programme: Lemmenkainen's Return (from opus 22) and his Symphony No 5 in E Flat opus 82. The performance needed more of the nobility of Sibelius's musical vision.

An independent QSO could take a leaf out of Ann Thompson's unsubsidised Medici book and restore the recitals once offered by the ABC. This weekend with Moravec was a total experience of his sophisticated art that would have been lessened without the Medici concert.