It’s rare in the field of art song that an accompanist gets the chance to sing along. But Malcolm Martineau revealed his considerable linguistic prowess as well as his pianistic skills when he found himself cast as dirty old man in the company of Joan Rodgers.

Pushkin wrote a dramatic poem called The Gypsies; Tchaikovsky set part of it as a miniature operatic scene; and Rodgers and Martineau performed Zemfira’s Song with great panache as part of an all-Pushkin recital at the Wigmore Hall. Rodgers as Zemfira hurled abuse and declaimed her Gypsy wrath, while Martineau curled his lip in protest as the scorned Aleko.

There was clearly a lot more to Pushkin settings than those “sad songs of Georgia”. We heard them too — supremely in Rachmaninov’s signature setting, dark with modal melismas, beautifully floated in Rodgers’s soprano. But we also experienced the fresher morning air of Glinka’s 1828 setting, as Rodgers’s voice was warming up and wooing her audience — and, with Martineau relishing the harp-like piano ripples and roulades, Rimsky-Korsakov’s response in 1897.

Those double and triple settings of the same words showed how the infinite variety of Pushkin’s verse called forth the same in his composers. Anton Rubinstein and Modest Mussorgsky were worlds apart in their settings of Noch (Night); Rubinstein purling out a salon melodrama, and Mussorgsky demanding so much more of singer and pianist in his nocturnal psychological scena, tense with tremolandos. A tiny poem about jealousies between A boy and a girl first featured as a coy folksong by Dargomizhsky, only to transmute into tense turmoil in the pen of Shostakovich.

Rodgers found the emotional register and shifting tones of voice for them all. Occasionally, the top of her soprano sounded a little tired; just one or twice she needed a reminder of the words. But this recital, sung entirely from memory and as if to the dacha born, was a revelatory docudrama of Russia’s literary and musical soul.

Britten’s The Poet’s Echo was also given a rare and superb performance, and even a patriotic Soviet-era ditty from Vladimir Vlasov surfaced, as The fountain in the courtyard of Bakhchisaray yielded a sparkling finale.

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