It's often a mistake to assume that you know how one of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's concerts will pan out. But with this programme, the unpredictable baritone surpassed even himself.

By rights, he should have excelled in the first half: arias from the less familiar end of the Russian repertoire, pieces which Hvorostovsky has gone some way towards making his own. And yet, even in a passionate aria from Rubinstein's The Demon and the famous love theme from Borodin's Prince Igor, he seemed unable to summon the usual velvet to his voice. Impending big moments were signalled by his surreptitiously undoing the button on his beautifully cut jacket. The lacklustre orchestral fillers - in which the Philharmonia of Russia, under Constantine Orbelian, sounded barely rehearsed - didn't help.

But then came the second half. For a nation that has set suffering to music more effectively than any other, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Russia has a rich and fascinating seam of 1940s popular songs, written to bring tears to the eyes of mothers, lovers and wives as they waited for news from the front. But one might not have anticipated just how well they would come across.

The microphone loves Hvorostovsky's voice, and gave these songs luxurious treatment. Best of the songs was the second, Dark Is the Night, which started as a bluesy little number about bullets whistling over the steppe and grew into a full-on torch song addressed to the wife waiting at home by the cradle.

As the balalaika whirred into action and the Yale Alumni Chorus, who had come a long way to sing very little, hummed and ahhed through Evgeny Stetsyuk's tear-jerking arrangements, the audience hung on every sentimental, irresistible word. Is there a vacancy for a Russian Tony Bennett? Hvorostovsky could give up the day job tomorrow.