The programme discreetly announced a Philip Langridge Celebration Concert, but this was, in truth, a seventieth birthday party, and there was a brand new work from a 75-year-old composer who was also in attendance.

Philip Langridge, the doyen of English tenors, created the title role in 1986 for Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus. And his career has made him the very personification of Orpheus — magicking music from the created worlds of composers from the 17th to the 21st centuries. The Wigmore Hall commissioned a new song for Langridge from Birtwistle, and its world premiere on Tuesday confirmed the creative agelessness of both musicians.

Langridge close focused the words of David Harsent in Birtwistle’s finely sculpted and tender setting of part of Harsent’s poem Vanitas. Think of the skull beneath the skin: long-lined couplets imagining a “shred of song drawn thro’ a blown egg”, a memento mori that solicits stillness, watchfulness.

Birtwistle’s minutely sentient wordsetting balances on a sequence of rocking piano figures that intensify to a moto perpetuo as the voice of the skull rises to a vision of joy — then vanishes as notes are dropped into silence.

Langridge and his fine accompanist David Owen Norris had the measure of its poignantly spare utterance. And the work breathed easily between song cycles by Vaughan Williams and Britten. In both On Wenlock Edge, with the excellent Doric String Quartet, and in the unquiet riddles and aphorisms of Britten’s settings of William Soutar in Who are these children?, Langridge celebrated his unique way with English music: at once tough and tender, strongly yet subtly inflected.

The evening was framed, imaginatively and courageously, by the opening seven songs of Schubert’s cycle Die schöne Mullerin and the last five from Winterreise. Apart from a frog sidling out of the air-conditioning and into Langridge’s larynx, the eternally youthful miller’s lad met the undying wanderer with delight and daring. Owen Norris’s piano playing was incomparably keen-eared, voicing out the innermost nuances of melody to clarify and complement those within Langridge’s fearless tenor.

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