Should the world ever require an elite fighting force of German lieder champions - I'm thinking something on the lines of an intergalactic knock-out Schubertiad - then here are three singers who would be a dead cert for the first team.

Happily there's little chance that Ian Bostridge, Dorothea Röschmann and Thomas Quasthoff would ever find themselves competing for the same position. Each of these superlative singers brings something different to the art-song table. And in a concert entirely handed over to the grandmaster of the lied - Franz Schubert himself - those contrasts proved vital.

Of the three, it's Quasthoff who puts the least affectation into his artistry, and the result is that his burnished baritone is that much more involving, open and honest. Even while his soul was soaring aloft in Ganymede, he made sure to give us a wistful, very human arc to the journey. It was a tender moment as his white-hot Erlkönig was unashamedly theatrical, flickering from the father's grim resolve to the insidious leer of the Erlking himself.

Bostridge's limpid tenor takes things to the other extreme. There's rarely any sitting back just to enjoy the language or a passing moment. Instead, he invests every word and every phrase with deeply expressive intent. Here, in the metaphysical gloom of Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass or Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt he was simply devastating.

So where to place Röschmann? Somewhere in the midfield, perhaps. Hers is a rich and complex lyricism, and if she breathed rapt absorption in the Mignon settings, her Gretchen (from Goethe's Faust) was better yet - in love with the pain of love, a disturbingly faustian pact of its own.

Sadly, there was the odd whiff of stale reverence floating over this concert; a sense of overkill simply because lieder had been released from its Wigmore cage and dressed up for a larger space. Yet it was the bigger setpieces - the cathedral confrontation from Faust and two rather more light-hearted ditties for all three singers - that fell flat.

Other niggles? Sometimes Julius Drake's muscular accompaniment could have done with a little more light and shade. And nobody needed Quasthoff's supercilious appeal to winter flu sufferers to cease their involuntary coughing. All that noted, let's have this top-tier trio back soon.

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