This was the first of a short series of concerts that places Dvorak's songs alongside those of Brahms. The idea is plausible: Dvorak, championed by the elder composer, regarded him as his model and mentor. Some, however, have claimed that Dvorak never fully emerged from Brahms's shadow. The argument, specious with regard to his symphonies, is true when we turn to Dvorak's songs.

The opening concert was also hampered by a somewhat unusual format. Dvorak was allotted to mezzo Bernarda Fink, Brahms to baritone Jonathan Lemalu, before the pair joined forces for Brahms's Four Duets. Throughout, we were conscious of the greater artist singing the lesser music. Fink combines richness of voice with sincerity of delivery. She was keenly sensual in the Love Songs and admirably free from sentimentality in the Four Songs in Folk Style. Even so, you couldn't help but notice the disparity between text and music in the songs themselves. The last of the Love Songs, for instance, speaks of grief at enforced separation, but the music fails to capture the requisite emotional resonance.

Dvorak, it would seem, was either unable or unwilling to go to extremes in his songs, in marked contrast to Brahms. Lemalu tackled the Vier Ernste Gesänge, one of the most gruelling of cycles in which the elderly Brahms mourns the death of his beloved Clara Schumann and confronts his own mortality. Lemalu sang them cleanly enough, but there was never any sense of titanic existential struggle. An earlier Brahms group was similarly cool, its emotional clout largely generated by Roger Vignoles' pianism. For all his popularity, Lemalu remains a puzzling artist, not always probing the meaning of what he sings. The final sequence of duets consequently emphasised his detachment in comparison with Fink's commitment.