MUSIC / What comes naturally: Adrian Jack on the tenor Simon Keenlyside and the pianist Nikolai Demidenko (CORRECTED)

CORRECTION (PUBLISHED 5 FEBRUARY 1993) APPENDED TO THIS ARTICLE

SIMON Keenlyside's lunchtime recital at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday began with a group of Schubert songs lasting no less than 35 minutes. Beginning with Waldesnacht and ending with Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, they altogether avoided the subject of love in favour of themes to do with Nature, solitude and Romantic notions of the infinite and sublime, showing Schubert in grand, expansive mood, the forerunner of Wagner.

Without a text to follow in Waldesnacht, the philistine question occurred how anyone could find so many words to describe the creative inspiration of Nature. Yet the sustained force of this very long song is hugely impressive and it plunged this fine tenor in at the deep end, not to mention his hapless accompanist, Malcolm Martineau, who had to submit his tremolandi for our approval on a not very marvellous piano in an uncomfortably cosy acoustic.

Keenlyside's voice is warm and mellow, and he uses it with all the refinement and discipline of a young singer not yet jaded by the rigours of a high-powered career (though he already has considerable experience in opera and recitals). He sustains the longest lines without strain and phrases with complete suppleness; his sound seems to be infinitely malleable. In Schiller's lament for a vanished world of Classical antiquity, his distant yet intensely yearning tone was exquisite. Yet it was a relief after all this idealism to relax to the sensuous charm of Duparc's Chanson triste. Some of Poulenc's Chansons gaillardes showed that he can be nimble and incisive too.

Keenlyside is an unusually modest, self-effacing singer, yet does not want powers of characterisation. What distinguishes his style of performance is its objective focus. He made no bones about Poulenc's rudest songs - no nudging or winking, though his scorn of a girl's small breasts was as insulting as you like, and a virgin's small cry of shock at a god's improper suggestion (about the possible use of a candle for want of a lover) was understated to perfection.

Nikolai Demidenko has started a series of six monthly recitals at the Wigmore Hall, representing the keyboard repertoire from Scarlatti to the present day. His first recital on Wednesday was modelled on the programme of a 'historical recital' given by Anton Rubinstein, often described as Liszt's most serious rival among pianists of the 19th century, though he was well known for playing wrong notes.

There were few of those from the polished and fastidious Demidenko. It was a long evening, partly because of some excessively slow tempi, which made Haydn's F minor Variations something of an endurance test. Though marked 'Andante', they went virtually at the same pace as the opening Adagio of Mozart's C minor Fantasy which followed. To do him justice, Demidenko never lost his grip, though there was something stiff and steely about his conception of the piece.

He began with seven Scarlatti sonatas, which are really inseparable from the sound of the harpsichord, and inevitably sound a bit prissy and pale on the piano. There were distinct echoes of Scarlatti in the finale of Clementi's Sonata in F sharp minor, one of several that Horowitz resurrected in the 1950s and made vehicles of digital wizardry.

Demidenko is less flamboyant, more steady and serious than Horowitz, but without pressing comparisons too far, he has a similar interest in strongly defined keyboard colours and sharply etched attack. Like many Russian pianists, he doesn't take naturally to the Classical style of the late 18th century, but he will be more interesting when he gets into the later Romantic repertoire.

CORRECTION

Last week Simon Keenlyside was incorrectly described as a tenor. He is, of course, a baritone.