Although she has only been on the musical scene barely three years, Amandine Savary did enough at the British Music Society’s closing event of the season to suggest that she will be a force to reckon with for a long time to come.

Her programme last Friday was French, apart from the first four Brahms ballades. It mattered little. What counted was her total engagement, generating “soul” in everything she played. The strength of her technique was apparent immediately in three of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards Sur l’Enfant Jésus, with layers of melody strongly differentiated.

But it was Dutilleux’s Piano Sonata Op 1 (1946-8) that really took the breath away. It was inspired by his recent marriage, and is the first of his works to break away from his rather staid musical upbringing.

It has the ecstatic wings of a newly-fledged bird.

Savary conveyed this at once: in the playful cross-rhythms of the Allegro, the free-flowing centre of the Lied, and – most of all – in her spritely skittering all over the keyboard in the final Choral and Variations.

In Brahms’s Op 10 Ballades, she was at pains to point contrasts, notably between gentleness and fire in No 2, and in finding an exquisite balance between melody and twinkling accompaniment in the final Andante. Her intensity in Debussy’s three Estampes (Woodcuts) led to some over-attention to detail.

But Grenada was unmistakably Spanish and the rain-gusts in the gardens vividly painted.