Christopher Maltman brought his survey of Schubert's late song cycles to a close with this carefully considered, if strikingly unusual, performance of Schwanengesang, the composer's last, fragmentary collection, posthumously ordered to form a fierce study of transience and existential isolation. Not a cycle in the strict sense, it is, nevertheless, one of the greatest challenges a lieder singer can face, requiring the ability to sustain a tragic mood, heavy with bitter psychological insights and shot through with glimpses, ironic and otherwise, of Romantic emotional optimism.

It was a challenge to which Maltman often rose superbly. His dark sound, with more than a touch of grit and metal in its tone, is heavyweight and startling in Schubert, though he also brings great lyrical elegance to such songs as Liebesbotschaft and Die Taubenpost. He's good with expressive and dramatic ambiguities. Ständchen hovered somewhere between seduction and threatening insistence. He hurled Atlas's dreadful "I bear the unbearable" at the audience in tones of accusatory fury, beneath which we sensed the overweening pride that caused Atlas's downfall in the first place. All in all, the performance seemed weighted towards rage rather than despair, reaching a disturbing climax with Maltman's articulate yet self-lacerating account of Der Doppelgänger.

Maltman's pianist was Graham Johnson, whose focused, detailed playing reminded us just how far Schwanengesang redefined the role of the accompanist and the instrument's expressive potential in the eerie arpeggios of Die Stadt and the unsettling harmonic oscillations of Am Meer. There were a couple of encores: Herbst, done with great sweep and grace; and Der Winterabend, which Maltman sang with exquisite softness over a delicate accompaniment that found Johnson at his most refined.