Two great English singers, two outstanding pianists, and two strongly contrasting song recitals: baritone Simon Keenlyside and tenor Ian Bostridge dominated a day at the Edinburgh festival, and their approaches could not have been more different. Keenlyside Queen's Hall concert with pianist Malcolm Martineau began as a celebration of English song, a garland of pastoral numbers by Percy Grainger, Frank Bridge and Arthur Somervell. But Keenlyside invested these seemingly slight songs with emotional depth, nowhere more so than in Gustav Holst's Betelgeuse, a vision of life on a distant star, the music a haunting air from another planet.

But it was Keenlyside's and Martineau's performance of Britten's Songs and Proverbs of William Blake that was the highlight. This astonishing song cycle contains some of the bleakest music Britten ever wrote for voice, and Keenlyside made each proverb a stern admonishment, and each song a brilliantly characterised miniature, from the creepy musical onomatopoeia of The Fly to the epic energy of The Tyger. Everything Keenlyside does is instinctive and immediate, and to hear him sing Ev'ry Night and Ev'ry Morn, the final song in the cycle, was a shattering experience, as he communicated the emotional ambiguity with a startling directness.

It was another world from Ian Bostridge's programme with Antonio Pappano. Bostridge's intellectual acuity made for a sharply defined interpretation of songs from Schubert's Schwanengesang. He turned Spring Longing into a febrile psychodrama, and Far Away into a terrifying expression of loneliness and isolation. Where Keenlyside's performances expose his own personality, Bostridge's characters are externalised creations, as if added to the substance of Schubert's music. But it's an equally powerful approach, and Bostridge's performances of songs by Hugo Wolf were captivating.