Filling the city with song! What the posters proclaimed was no idle boast. The second biennial festival of art song called LeedsLieder+ offered as many as eight events a day. And the plus sign was significant. As well as outstanding performances of mainstream lieder, the festival was busy creating new song in its Composers and Poets Forum.

The two high points of the weekend were recitals by the English tenor Mark Padmore and the German baritone Florian Boesch – both accompanied by Roger Vignoles, the artistic director of the festival. Boesch replaced a suddenly indisposed Robert Holl, and he embarked on a Winterreise of such angst and anger that even Schubert himself might have been alarmed. What was so exciting was his lashing out against fate, his refusal to accept comfort without cynicism – and that Vignoles and Boesch seemed, inevitably, to be walking a tightrope of musical risk.

A similar sense of savage invective against the pain of human consciousness seared its way through Padmore’s performance of Britten’s Winter Words. These settings of Thomas Hardy were passionately recreated in the hyperobservant accompanying of Vignoles and in Padmore’s ever more expansive tenor. Padmore also presented the world premiere of Sally Beamish’s Four Songs of Hafez - hypnotic and artfully inflected settings of the 14th-century Sufi mystic.

The festival’s other major premiere was of Kenneth Hesketh’s Shimmerwords and Idle Songs. Elizabeth Watts (soprano) and Gary Matthewman (piano) relished the six brilliantly contrived settings of Tang-period Chinese poetry in a concert that also featured the baritone Ronan Collett and his outstanding young accompanist Nicholas Rimmer in performances of Copland, Foster and Ives.

At a morning concert given by Rimmer with Nicky Spence (tenor) and Marianne Vidal (mezzo), the youngest audience member was just 2. The musicians had been invited “to introduce a new generation” to the delights of art song – and their zany zeal in magicking their audience through Scots jigs, enchanted French gardens and spooky German forests epitomised the enterprise and zest of the festival as a whole.

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