No one can be more pleased than Martha Guth that the Wigmore Hall has resumed its biennial International Song Competition. Last time the Wigmore hosted the competition in 2003, she had to settle for fourth place. Now the 30-year-old Canadian-American soprano walks away with the victor’s laurels and, thanks to the largesse of the Kohn Foundation, a cheque for £10,000.

Guth was as much the people’s choice as that of the expert panel (which included The Times’s critic Hilary Finch). It was a very canny move to finish her half hour with two well-known Strauss gems; the serene results drew thunderous cheers.

She also had the knack of knowing exactly what clothes best suited the bright sheen of her plangent soprano: sparky Copland, and, best of all, deliciously ambiguous Poulenc.

Still, I’d have placed her second. What I craved from her programme – the dramatic extremes and pure intensity of a true storyteller – never came. Didn’t she play a little safe?

The big mystery of the evening was the unplaced Katherine Broderick. This year’s Kathleen Ferrier competition winner has no shortage of silverware, but in her immaculate programme we heard all the expressive nuance that Guth had sometimes lacked: decadent, risqué glamour in Schoenberg; coy charm in Schubert, and, yes, a concentrated intensity to Strauss’s fiercely lamenting Geduld.

But the singer with the most potential in song was tenor Ben Johnson, placed third. The youngest performer in the contest (he’s still just 23) went for the hardest repertoire, and yet the psychological torment of his chosen Wolf settings steamed out with incredible assurance. If he’d only turned his gaze to lighter fare, he might have scooped the top gong.

Two disappointments: whatever the judges saw in the runner-up Robin Tritschler, I didn’t: a sensitive but over-respectful demeanour blurred the emotional impact of his heady, soaring tenor. But they were absolutely right to select an accompanist from the earlier rounds (Joseph Middleton) for the pianist’s prize. None of his competitors in the final shone out.

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