Finally, I understood. Schumann wrote that long, long piano postlude to his songcycle Dichterliebe not to prolong, or even to assuage, the agony — but because he knew that his audience would simply need time to recover.

Only very rarely are we felled by the experience of Dichterliebe. But at the end of Thursday’s performance by Gerald Finley and Julius Drake the heart was stunned, the head left reeling. Finley revealed Schumann’s setting of Heine’s poems of love and loss as a cycle of hatred and anger. For those with ears to hear, Schumann never did mollify Heine’s bitterness and biting irony. He reinforced it musically, so that an entirely truthful performance is almost too painful to sing or to hear.

Finley and his accompanist, Drake, were unafraid. They laid Dichterliebe and themselves on the line, lengthening a vowel here, prolonging a moment of silence there — and stopping the clocks in a transfixing performance of that song about the waking, weeping dream. Finley’s baritone has the breadth and the total assurance of technique to take whatever’s demanded of it. And, in this uniquely generous performance, he gave us his all.

Finley, who hails from Ottawa, crossed the pond for the second half of his programme, presenting Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs — and then nine songs by Charles Ives. Here, as in the Schumann, Finley dared a further degree of truthfulness, meeting Ives’s responses head-on, whether in hilariously ecstatic expectancy before curtain-up at the opera (from Memories) or in the tear-misted childhood remembrances of Tom sails away.

And since, in the end, life really is too serious to be taken seriously, I have to say that, until you’ve experienced the Finley-Drake take on Charlie Rutlage, the tale of a Texan cowboy’s death during round-up, crushed under his four-legged friend, then you really haven’t lived.