Christmas can be a fallow time for classical music, with many venues given over to seasonal extravaganzas or, alternatively, closed altogether. The Wigmore Hall is an exception though, maintaining its usual level of seriousness even through the dog days that separate Christmas and New Year.

Thomas Allen's recital with pianist Malcolm Martineau was a thoughtful affair, their programme carefully constructed so that the Nativity became the focal point of a complex meditation on the relationships between sacred and secular love, childhood innocence and adult experience. Wolf's Nun Wandre Maria, depicting the holy family seeking shelter in Bethlehem, was accordingly juxtaposed with his Benedeit Die Sel'ge Mutter, in which a man alternately mourns the death of his mistress's mother and blesses the day she gave birth to her daughter. The mystic beauty of Samuel Barber's Sure On This Shining Night was deliberately undermined by the proximity of Ives's Tom Sails Away, with its intimations of a distant war threatening humanity's spiritual aspirations.

As always, Allen was a supremely intelligent recitalist, matching sound with sense, probing the meaning of a text without fracturing the vocal line. The veiled tone he adopted for Nun Wandre Maria suggested both the exhaustion of Mary and Joseph and the contemplation of a profound religious mystery. Turning to a group of songs by Strauss, he revealed the dark undercurrents beneath their rapturously flow. The group included Zueignung, more frequently mauled as an encore by sopranos, though here Allen made us aware that the reiterated thanks are offered as much in bitter accusation as in gratitude.

Martineau, however, took a while to settle, making heavy weather of the Schumann songs and rarely matching his intensity in Strauss. He was more at ease with Wolf's understated yet tortuous chromatics, though he only struck form after the interval, perfectly judging both Barber's unforced lyricism and Ives's pointillistic irony.