After his Hans Sachs at the Edinburgh Festival, Robert Holl, that great Meistersinger of bass-baritones, made a triumphant return to London and to the Wigmore Hall with a programme of the very last songs Schubert wrote: his Schwanengesang.

For a singer of such enormous physical and vocal presence, Holl has always been strangely elusive in this country. Maybe our concert managements are seduced too easily, too quickly by the latest flavour of the year, the newest Lieder-singer noisily promoted by a major record label. The hardy perennials can be overlooked — and it’s our loss.

Holl grips the listener by the neck — from the first phrase he utters — and he doesn’t let go until the last note of the final encore has set up a roar of applause. And it always does.

Holl’s ability to embody not only the particular musical presence of each song, but also the emotional effect of every word, is unique. His eyes close, his hands grasp each musical gesture, tracking minutely the nerve-system of the composer’s word-setting. In a lesser artist, this could become tedious. In Holl, the voice responds with the strength and freedom of an actor working with a truly great stage director.

Every Lieder-singer has to be his own director, of course — supported only by the accompanist’s stage-management. And with Roger Vignoles at the piano, extraordinary things can happen. As in the second of the Rellstab settings, for example, at the start of Schwanengesang.

Kriegers Ahnung is a Warrior’s Foreboding; and Vignoles’s control of the taut chords, stinging accents and chilling silences — so characteristic of Schwanengesang — set the aching legato of Holl’s voice into thrilling relief.

With Vignoles, Holl can fine down his huge bass-baritone to shape the tiniest turn of note and phrase. And then, in Schubert and Heine’s existential vision of man, isolated in a desolate landscape of the psyche, he can take on the pain of the world itself — like a great, suffering Lear.

After the Doppelgänger, and the Atlas, consolation was offered in two exquisitely chosen encores: Mutter Erde and Nachtviolen. The audience left in a rare and reverent silence.