In choosing the programme for his Wigmore Hall recital, Simon Keenlyside hardly let himself off lightly. Basing it on three great song cycles, each one of the supreme masterpieces in their respective traditions, the baritone left himself little margin for miscalculation.

The concert hall still seems a slightly alien environment to a singer who inhabits an opera stage so instinctively, and uses his body to articulate mood and emotion. But his platform manner is much more contained now, and though there is still the odd suggestion of the song equivalent of painting by numbers - forceful, extrovert tone for this verse, withdrawn introspection for the next - in English and French especially his responses seem more instinctive and naturally expressive than before.

The voice and Keenlyside's control over it were outstanding. Even in Schumann's Dichterliebe, where there was too little effort to make the audience listen to every word rather than admire the general effect, the sounds he made were glorious. Yet it was Malcolm Martineau's accompaniments that caught the ear most powerfully.

Six of Butterworth's Shropshire Lad settings, ending with Is My Team Ploughing?, were hauntingly delivered, with the switches between innocent reverie and poignant nostalgia perfectly judged; only the dialogue between the living and the dead in Is My Team was a bit too archly characterised. Then it was on to Poulenc, concentrating on the two poets he set more than any others, Apollinaire and Eluard. Keenlyside ended with Poulenc's song masterpiece, the Eluard cycle Tel Jour Telle Nuit, a sequence of love songs as profound as any in 20th-century music, for which he regularly found precisely the right tone, and the perfect poise for the last and greatest of all, Nous Avons Fait la Nuit.