The atmosphere of this concert was not wholly easy: the soprano Joan Rodgers was struggling with a cough, her accompanist with a squeaky piano stool - and the audience with the idea that there weren't very many of them there.

Perhaps the repertoire kept some away. The music of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski is still uncharted territory to many, and Rodgers's programme, of his songs interspersed with settings by Tchaikovsky, offered no obvious show-stoppers.

Yet it gave an intriguing look at several aspects of Szymanowski's style, from the early solemnity of The Swan, written in 1904, to two numbers from the 1932 Kurpie Songs, using folk material in an astringent, layered way that smacked of Bartok. Rodgers's bright, fast-vibrating soprano, though not always sounding absolutely secure, was a convincing advocate nonetheless.

The evening started with his five Buntelieder, the so-called "colourful songs" that lived up to their collective title: the first, The Hermit, swept us into a world of involved chromaticism, and gave the supportive young accompanist Christopher Glynn an early opportunity to shine in the dancing piano postlude.

However, three numbers from Word Songs brought a very different side to Szymanowski's writing, far simpler texturally but freer in terms of tonality; the repeated falling lines of the middle song, Wanda, were mesmerising in Rodgers's intense delivery.

These three were given in Polish; the programme also found Rodgers singing in German, French and Russian. And, with the Seven Songs to Poems by James Joyce, in English, which wasn't always crystal clear. However, these were the Szymanowski songs in which Rodgers seemed most confident.

In the Tchaikovsky, Rodgers found a veiled, dark tone for At the Ball and a light touch for the old-fashioned melodies of Sérenade and Rondel; but the most effective was the wistful Was I Not a Little Blade of Grass, Rodgers and Glynn catching its poignancy in a perfectly balanced partnership.