Tackling the summit of the Lieder repertoire, Schubert's Winterreise, which details one man's journey through a wintry landscape while a sense of rejection and alienation eats away at his soul, is an arduous experience for any singer, as it should be for the audience, too. John Tomlinson's exploration of these 24 songs, with David Owen Norris very much his equal at the piano, was notable for the stamina that he brought to the task, aided along the way by a few glasses of water.

Tomlinson turned 60 last year, and it would be pointless to pretend that his every note resonates with the richness it once had; there was some hollowed-out tone. But Winterreise's almost unremitting bleakness is the ideal arena in which to deploy stressed, even ugly sounds, and Tomlinson knew how to turn such flaws to expressive purpose.

The sheer size of his voice, however, remains unimpaired, and it blasted out with the force of a gale. But overall, his was an intimate as well as intricate portrayal of a human falling to pieces, and his close attention to the text and idiomatic German gave full value to the words.

At the piano, Norris's focus on the many picturesque details of the natural world Schubert conveys was never at the expense of the broader musical picture. He gave touching immediacy to those rare positive moments - the sudden buoyancy of Der Post, or the innocent lyricism of Der Lindenbaum - that temporarily halted the steady downwards spiral of Schubert's broken individual, here made poignant by two well-matched artists.