Who said concert-going was in decline? Once again, the Festival Hall was packed for Mitsuko Uchida's latest recital, and rightly so: the opportunity of hearing one of today's great pianists play late Beethoven was an experience not to be missed, and in the event she provided one of the most transporting concerts London has heard all year.

This sequence of the last three Beethoven sonatas was an experience of rare intensity. It was not an 'easy' programme, and as Charles Rosen puts it in his recently published companion to the Beethoven sonatas, understanding these final works 'requires an active participation from the listener never demanded before from the piano sonata'. A similar sequence of pieces by practically any other composer might seem like stolid, unvaried programming, but here Beethoven is full of contrasts and says almost everything that music can say. People who don't know these works need perhaps to think of the late paintings of Goya, a figure with whom Beethoven has many fascinating parallels, to imagine the strangeness and even spirituality of this music. Beethoven's take on religion may have been decidedly unorthodox, but 'spiritual' is the only word to describe the tone here, and indeed it is surprising how often his themes are almost hymn-like.

In Uchida's hands the subject of the closing variations in Op 109 had concentrated calm before she began to build up the movement's virtuosity, and the second half of the last sonata, Op 111, started with a simplicity that took one outside oneself.

By this stage of Beethoven's career, his music was more about textures than obvious tunes, and Uchida recognised this. There was delicacy and fire in Op 109, and she made light work of the opening to Op 110. Here she also made sense of the unpredictable second movement, was eloquent in pain of the Adagio and magisterial in the fugal finale.

But Op 111 was the high point, beginning with the attack and ferocious propulsion she brought in her tireless playing of the first movement. She went on to really swing the 'boogie-woogie' variation, where Beethoven seems to invent jazz, and the celestial trills were heartstopping: but the despair and sublimity of both this music and Uchida's performance are really beyond words.