Peter Donohoe at the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber

The brave souls of Viva Piano are back, with Peter Donohoe's Sunday night concert being the first of two piano recitals organised for March and April.

Donohoe can come across as something of a pianist provocateur. He came on stage and set into Haydn's English Sonata with a wilfulness that was worrying.

The first movement had bull-at-a-gate tempi and cavalier untidiness.

But all was redeemed in the Adagio. In lesser hands, these Haydn slow movements can flutter shapelessly all over the place but Donohoe's control was awe-inspiring. New colours were illuminated in a scale of pedalled staccato or a dramatic dive on to a chromatic resting place.

Beethoven's Tempest Sonata provided the key to the first half of the programme. Here the dynamic Donohoe made the utmost of the composer's dramatic swervings. The English pianist's conception was an orchestral one, yet even in the middle of storm-tossed pages, there were ineffable delicacies, as when he set a moment of recitative in a subtle haze of pedal.

The Adagio benefited from the same sense of phrasing and line that fired Haydn's slow movement, and if the swoons of the final Allegretto bordered on the melodramatic, they certainly fitted with the sonata's nickname.

The rest of the evening was devoted to Chopin. In the F minor Ballade, Donohoe sank into carpets of luscious chromaticism, at one point kneading the luxuriant textures between powerful fingers. Elsewhere, sparseness of texture combined with lingering rubato to telling effect.

After a willowy Berceuse, with those inflections that anticipate Floyd Cramer by more than a century, Donohoe told us he was so enjoying the piano and us as an audience that he would play some extra pieces.

The three waltzes of Opus 64 were welcomed, the first two only too familiar, the third delivered with a refreshingly lusty swing to it.

Two Nocturnes of Opus 62 featured the coolest of measured part-playing with an unexpected streak of lightning in the first and some atmospheric, misty pedalling in the second, and the concert ended in a blaze of brilliance with the third and most Lisztian of Chopin's Scherzos.

A Rachmaninov encore sent us off into the night with memories of a choice of Russian sweets to savour. More please.