Gerald Finley will be Covent Garden’s new Eugene Onegin in the spring. When he strode on to the Wigmore Hall platform, for a rare London solo recital, he already looked the part. This, after all, was part of the Wigmore’s Russian season and, broad of shoulder and noble of bearing, Finley launched confidently into a debonair Don Juan’s Serenade, and went on to grip his capacity audience with six more songs by Tchaikovsky.

One of them, of course, had to be None but the lonely heart – and Finley made us feel we’d never heard it before. Very slow, very restrained through its dark vowels, a deep ache spread through the words, words which could have been describing Onegin’s own suffering.

Julius Drake, at the piano, offered a virtuoso prelude and postlude to Whether the day reigns, and his vividly costumed playing made little salon melodramas of each song.

And then Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. This is quintessential Russian bass/baritone territory; and while Finley, purely physiologically, didn’t have the craggy, basso profundo depths for the chilling voice of Death itself, the unbroken line of pity and compassion that ran through the perfectly integrated registers of his voice (and in perfect Russian) led the heart with compelling intensity from the cradle to the field of battle.

After the interval, Finley, Drake and the audience surfaced into fresher, clearer air. Here were Charles Ives’s Swimmers – so elated with mastery of the “windy waters” that the voice breaks out of song into exultant shout at the end.

Then the calm currents of The Housatonic at Stockbridge, with Drake providing the great river’s glinting surface, and Finley managing the powerful undertow.

Finley’s finest hour was his magisterial and daring performance of Ned Rorem’s prose settings of Walt Whitman’s harrowing War Scenes. And the intensity didn’t let up until after the searing emotional simplicity of a set of Samuel Barber songs.

Then, because the recital was being recorded for the Wigmore Hall Live label, five delicious bonus minutes of encores grave and gay.

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