If the mark of a creative genius is to confront the familiar and show it in a new light, then Thomas Adès is such a genius. The soloist was Ian Bostridge, but the sensibility that shaped the programme was Adès's.

His programme brought together Britten's Sechs Holderlin-Fragmente, those poignant settings of fugitive texts by the demented Romantic Friedrich Holderlin, with equally fragmentary utterances of Gyorgy, Kurtag and two piano solos by Liszt

In the transcription of Isolde's Liebestod, by Liszt's father-in-law, Richard Wagner, he attempted something even more daring. Liszt's arrangement is a stunningly inventive and beautiful re-creation of Wagner's score, but instead of simulating the waves of orgiastic bliss that end Tristan und Isolde, Adès chose to highlight discontinuities.

Kurtag was represented by his Holderlin fragment, enigmatically voiced by Bostridge, and three piano miniatures delivered with due idiosyncrasy by Adès. But surpassing all else in audacity was their joint reading of Schumann's Dichterliebe, a rendering that explored the poet's morbid, suicidal state of mind to devastating effect.

Normally tender moments like the beloved's "I love you" or the poet's dream of abandonment were pregnant with irony, as the cycle moved towards the watery grave of the final song.