In the dark days of January it’s as well to find beauty in desolation. Pure serendipity then that this intimate recital of 20th century and contemporary song should be performed before a triptych of blackened trees laden with snow.

Mark Padmore’s voice was perfectly suited to this setting as it is to this repertoire. Richard Rodney Bennett’s Tom O’Bedlam’s Song, a technically demanding duo for voice and cello full of wide open intervals that let in the bitter winter chill, was beautifully served by Padmore’s ability to turn on a pin from haunting, precarious tenderness to a rich, compelling lyricism.

Continuing the theme, Francis Poulenc’s Elegie in memory of horn virtuoso Dennis Brain was played movingly by Richard Watkins whose generous warmth of tone captured the mood of regret, longing and more than a hint of the blues.

Gerald Barry’s intriguing dual language setting of Jabberwocky – a world premiere – brought together piano, horn and voice with some wonderfully primal squelching from the horn in the French version and a very insistent beheading in the German. Eccentric but not merely nonsense, Barry’s setting reaches deep into the darkness of Carroll’s much-loved poem.

The final piece alone would have been worth the ticket price and the trudge through the snow. Benjamin Britten’s setting of Edith Sitwell’s Still Falls The Rain sets profound anguish against a mesmerising spareness, Padmore fluting almost the plaintive call to prayer of the refrain, and horn and voice sighing gently, and brilliantly, as one through the closing bars.