One was aware, after having listened to tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Julius Drake for the best part of 90 minutes (and held my breath for what felt like the same amount of time) that something rather special had just happened.

However, any immediate response feels wholly inadequate in comparison to the lasting effect this concert will surely have on those who attended, and indeed, perhaps the most one can say about the performance of Schubert's Winterreise is that there is, it seems at present, no real way of knowing how remarkable their achievement was.

Schubert's mammoth song-cycle was completed in 1827 and sets to music a collection of 24 poems by Wilhelm Muller which retrace the winter journey of a solitary figure in one continuous dramatic monologue. Muller's protagonist can be variously thought of as a jilted lover, a tragic soul in the throes of an existential crisis, a lonely and bereaved romantic who wanders in search of his beloved, or just simply a haunted fool who can only ever truly love his own capacity for interminable self-analysis.

Padmore's interpretation and characterisation of the narrator were faultless from the start and our disbelief was suspended throughout his poignant and dramatic personification of this mysterious man. Time is somehow suspended in the re-telling of the journey, as if we are subjected to the private, interior time of the story-teller, and we are also never permitted to know exactly where or how far he has travelled. Which only makes his final, very real encounter with the Hurdy-gurdy Man whose "little plate remains ever empty" all the more ironic.