Would she, or wouldn’t she? After a perfectly devised recital, an encore can seem inept, almost absurd. But Alice Coote was called back to the platform so many times that she and her accompanist Julius Drake were all but held to ransom. And the reward was just about the only song they could get away with: Schubert’s An die Musik.

Coote sang it as an ecstatic hymn to the muse who had inspired her all evening: the transforming power of music itself. And Coote is one of the very few artists who — rather than just singing superbly well — can actually summon up its presence. It has something to do with the nature of her breath control: the breath carries melody and every nuance within her mezzo-soprano rather as a brush, loaded with paint, washes the colour across the canvas. And it has everything to do with a personal commitment so focused on the urgent need to communicate through song that an audience is gripped within a tense silence of expectation.

Two groups of Schubert songs were sung without a break. Drake had devised a continuum of youth and death, dream and waking life that expressed the very heart of Schubert and which he bound together in his piano playing. Coote’s breath controlled the movement of wind and water within the simple melody of Am Bach im Frühling. Then a sudden shock as the death’s head appeared, and her voice took on the suffocating gasps of a young girl’s terror in Der Tod und das Mädchen.

Coote’s body language incarnated the soul-state of each song, without any extraneous histrionics. As her perfectly controlled half-voice sighed into death, the black-clad body seemed drained of all life. And as she sang of Gretchen am Spinnrade, Coote captured the sensuality of infatuated distraction as few singers do.

Mahler’s song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen dominated the first half. “I’ve a gleaming knife in my breast!” cries the third song; and we felt that sharp blade of grief in the present tense. Drake constantly fine-tuned the shifting colours of Coote’s voice as he supported her every response throughout the evening.