This was the penultimate concert of the South Bank series on Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin, but our attention was diverted towards two poets whose work was coloured by the years of fear.

Three Russian soloists were to have performed one song cycle each. But with the tenor Ilya Levinsky ill, a replacement was found in Mark Tucker. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who accompanied all three, played the gracious host and there were few glimpses of him as the attention-grabbing piano soloist.

His reticence was most noticeable in Prokofiev's settings of five poems by Anna Akhmatova, pieces that argue strongly for the composer's tender side. Elena Prokina could have used more support and, were it not for her wayward tuning, her expressive, sensuous singing would have made this a compelling performance.

The poet set by Shostakovich can rest easy, having had nothing to do with Stalin, but the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti, composed long after the dictator's death, is still in part a lament on the oppression of an artist. The poems of anger at Dante's exile and of assertion of the divine gift of creativity drew the most heartfelt responses from the composer; they also drew Ashkenazy's most spirited playing, while Sergei Leiferkus's bass-baritone was authoritative throughout.

Rodion Shchedrin was in the audience to hear the first British performance of his My Age, My Wild Beast, a melodrama interspersing settings of Osip Mandelstam's poetry with readings from an actress playing his friend Akhmatova. Mandelstam was a victim of Stalin: he died in a transit camp after years of hounding.

Shchedrin's tribute was intriguing rather than over-emotive, and Tucker gave an admirable performance in his slender but sweet, malleable tenor. Shchedrin's settings, mostly coolly lyrical, and the crisp English narrations from Harriet Walters, let the poet's humanity come across as effectively as the horror of his fate.