Antonio Pappano could have been forgiven for wanting to be somewhere else during this recital - at home, perhaps, flicking through the score of Verdi's La Forza del Destino, which he'll be conducting for the first time at Covent Garden in three weeks. He couldn't even console himself by thinking of the money, as he and Ian Bostridge were giving their services gratis.

But all in a good cause. This programme of Hugo Wolf's music was a fundraiser for its venue, LSO St Luke's, the converted Hawksmoor church on down-at-heel Old Street, which has been the home of the orchestra's education work for the past 18 months. And if Pappano was distracted from his role as Bostridge's accompanist, he wasn't going to show it, unless you count the odd settling-down smudge during the first couple of songs.

In fact, if anyone seemed less than relaxed it was Bostridge, who for some reason was suffering from slightly insecure tuning. Yet, though this may have prevented some of Wolf's slowly climbing melodies from blooming quite as Bostridge would have liked, it didn't seriously detract from a programme of great emotional range.

Starting with the hesitant, building hope of Der Genesene an die Hoffnung, it moved through the unease of Um Mitternacht and the joyous yearning of Ganymede, in which Bostridge's sustained notes took on an extraordinary intensity. Some of Wolf's heavier accompaniments found Bostridge taking his voice to its limits to stay above them, but he was never overwhelmed.

The pointed comedy of the demanding final song, Storchenbotschaft, didn't quite come off; Bostridge's stamina was flagging. But the encore, Im Grüner Landschaft Sommerflor, returned us to the kind of magical stillness we'd been enveloped by earlier in Im Frühling, with Pappano's winding piano wrapping itself around Bostridge's wistful vocal line. These songs are masterpieces; we may acknowledge Wolf as the successor of Schubert and Schumann, but the true extent of his genius is something we perhaps don't yet fully recognise.