Classical concerts, some say, are stuck in a rut. What is to be done? Combine the music with other art forms, some suggest; others advocate using lighting and costume. The Renaissance Muse - essentially a staged recital by countertenor Andreas Scholl, first given a fortnight ago in New York - did both.

English lute and folk songs alternated with words on love by writers including Shakespeare and Marlowe, declaimed in mid-Atlantic tones by actor Laila Robins. Two fluent accompanists, lutenist Crawford Young and harpist Stacey Shames, joined them on a cushion-piled stage that was at times colourfully lit and at times almost dark apart from the bright, white, superfluous surtitles at either side. The Broadway and opera director Mark Lamos had knitted their contributions into a continuous 75-minute show, attempting, with varying success, to set up a kind of dialogue between singer and actor - all of whom were in dressed velvety pseudo-Elizabethan costume.

Sadly, the result didn't tell us much more about the material, nor did it intensify our experience of it. If anything, it served to distract from the fact that Scholl was not in his best voice. He needed two extra breaths just to get him through the first line of John Dowland's I Saw My Lady Weep, and though his initially thinnish tone ripened a little through the evening, sounding at its most beautiful in the folk song She Moved Through the Fair, his voice rarely blossomed and resonated as we knew it could.

There was something else missing, especially in the lute songs: the sex. The delicious melancholy that late-Elizabethan and Jacobean men so loved to assume may have gone out of fashion, but singing about trying to get laid never has. Some songs that seem to tell only of romantic despair are in fact laced with 16- and 17th-century innuendo. But the team presented almost everything in absolute earnest, raising just a little giggle with the two numbers that were unambiguously naughty.