In autumn, the soprano Gweneth Ann Rand and pianist Simon Lepper performed Messiaen’s mammoth song cycle Harawi in the Wigmore Hall, with a small, spread-out audience physically present in front of them. This week they returned with more Messiaen, his Poèmes pour Mi. The nine movements of this 1936 song cycle – named for Messiaen’s wife Claire Delbos, whose nickname was Mi and who is personified in the central song, The Bride – were framed by two works of five songs each: Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Barber’s Despite and Still. Messiaen would have loved the symmetry.

It was a meaty programme that would ideally have been heard with Rand’s substantial soprano making the floor vibrate beneath your feet – but this time it was for livestream audiences only. The pandemic has meant that singers have had to learn how to deliver meaningful sung texts to row upon row of empty seats. Rand met that challenge, colouring her words with vivid changes of tone, and Lepper’s piano lines inked in further light and shade, his melodies singing as surely as Rand’s.

Together they created an atmosphere of intensity in Wagner’s pensive, dark-toned Wesendonck songs. These pivot on Im Treibhaus, a sultry evocation of humid greenhouse heat that is pregnant with possibility, and Rand held this beautifully in control, her voice poised on the high, slender tightrope stretched by the piano. Then the Messiaen seemed to free something up, with Rand relishing the quick flow of text and soaring through the high, untethered phrases. This was an authoritative, polished performance, piano and voice capturing the music’s quicksilver changes of mood and colour together.

Barber’s Despite and Still is not often heard, burdened with a reputation for being opaque and difficult, which it doesn’t deserve. These searching songs of love, loneliness and isolation, setting words by Graves, Roethke and Joyce, brought out some of Barber’s most harmonically adventurous writing – but next to Wagner and Messiaen the songs seemed almost easy-going, thanks also to the relaxed way Rand and Lepper shaped them. The fourth song, with its habanera rhythm in the piano, went with a gentle, noirish swing, and the title song brought this satisfyingly thought-through programme to an impassioned close.

• Available until 1 April at wigmore-hall.org.uk.