In October 1943, the premiere of Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings took place at the Wigmore Hall, with Peter Pears and Dennis Brain as the soloists. It's become one of Britten's best-loved works, and so made an obvious finale to the Wigmore's In Memoriam weekend, marking the 30th anniversary of the composer's death. A bulked up Nash Ensemble, conducted by Edward Gardner, provided the string orchestra; the soloists were Mark Padmore, replacing an indisposed Ian Bostridge, and Richard Watkins.

Padmore had given a lunchtime recital of Britten songs earlier on, but was still in marvellous voice, characterising each setting personally and intelligently. Every nuance of the vocal lines and the string writing was conveyed in a way that would have been almost unthinkable in a larger hall, and Watkins' assertive, agile horn playing added its own robust colours.

Earlier, the viola and string orchestra version of Britten's Dowland meditation, Lachrymae - with Laurence Power as the assured soloist - had provided a dark-hued instrumental interlude, and it had been just as much of a revelation to experience the settings of Les Illuminations and the late cantata Phaedra in such closeup detail, too.

Gardner drew a gutsy, gutty sound from the strings for the opening flourishes of Les Illuminations, generating an adolescent muscularity that suited the Rimbaud poems. Soprano Lisa Milne judged the dimensions of the performance perfectly, just as Catherine Wyn-Rogers was perfectly focused in the spare, neoclassical sound world of Phaedra, even though she did not always wring as much pathos from the Lowell text as she might have done.