Sibelius's songs are not the most famous parts of his output, but a selection of his settings of Swedish poetry was one of the highlights of soprano Soile Isokoski's recital with Marita Viitasalo. In a handful of vivid gestures, Sibelius conjures an expressive world in which images of nature are enmeshed with human experiences and emotions.

In Sigh, Rushes, Sigh, a gently rippling accompaniment dramatised Isokoski's yearning to know the fate of a young girl; shimmering, otherworldly trills suggested her terrible torture and death. Isokoski filled the two minutes of this little song with a huge emotional range, and the return of the opening music in the coda had a tragic power.

The North was an even more impressive distillation of Sibelius's technique - and Isokoski's artistry. The text ponders the migration of swans, who fly to the south only to return inexorably to the north. Throughout the song, Viitasalo played a delicate chromatic cluster, a sound at once sensuous and ice-cold, and Isokoski's reflective vocal line was only released from this musical obsessiveness at the very end of the song, with an ambivalent cadence.

There was more Finnish intensity in Aulis Sallinen's song-cycle, Four Dream Songs, with its unrelentingly gloomy imagery of death, dreams and sleep. There was an unyielding quality to Sallinen's music, too, with its tolling chords and brittle melodic lines. Yet Isokoski dramatised the whole sequence with variety and clarity, especially the third number, Dreams Each Within Each, whose final line was a chilling scream. She found an even greater dramatic range in Debussy's Verlaine settings, Ariettes Oubliées, creating a desperate, obsessive energy in Merry-go-round, and an overwhelming sense of loss in the final Spleen.