Some of the great Lieder cycles are regularly sung by both men and women - Mahler's Ruckert Songs and his Kindertotenlieder, for example - but others are more gender specific. Schumann's Dichterliebe, and Schubert's Winterreise and Schöne Müllerin are rarely tackled by women, while the voice embodied in both Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben and Wagner's Wesendonck Songs is so unambiguously female that few men attempt them. By including both of these in his latest recital, then, the baritone Matthias Goerne was clearly sending out a message, though its meaning was hard to define.

The hall was by no means full, and it was hard not to empathise with those who stayed away. Neither of Goerne's lugubrious performances offered any new perspectives on familiar music, just the nagging sense of hearing great songs turned inside out for no convincing reason. Alexander Schmalcz's piano accompaniments repeatedly found themselves suspended above the voice rather than cushioning or wrapping around it. The vocal lines sometimes sat unconvincingly low in Goerne's range, sounding gravelly rather than authoritative, and the music lost all its radiance and charm. With that went any sense of the protagonist's vulnerability in Frauenliebe too, as well as much of the emotional charge of the Wesendonck Songs, which sounded so dogged it was hard to believe they were composed while Wagner was working on Tristan und Isolde.

Around the two cycles Goerne placed three late Schumann settings usually sung by a soprano and Berg's Four Songs Op 2, whose nocturnal images are at least plausibly androgynous. He delivered the Berg settings wonderfully, handling their steady drift from chromaticism to atonality with total naturalness so that the final song really did anticipate the world of the opera Wozzeck. It suggests that a recital devoted to the songs of the Second Viennese School might be more rewarding territory for Goerne than any more bizarre exercises in musical cross-dressing.