Often the best musical experiences are those which ambush unexpectedly. A concert built around poems of John Donne was bound to interest, with Corin Redgrave as a slightly ­over-interpretative speaker and Elizabeth Kenny, who puts mercurial life into the ghostly art of lute playing.

A first half of early Donne settings, as well as lute music by Dowland, instilled a mood of meditation, at once poignant and erotic. The chance to revisit some of the finest poems in the English language offered serious pleasure: Go and catch a falling star, The Sunne Rising, Sweetest love I doe not goe, sung or read.

The shock came when tenor Ian Bostridge — who had delivered the 17th century settings with expressive poise — was joined by pianist Mitsuko Uchida for Britten’s cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, written in August 1945 and dedicated to the tenor Peter Pears. Uchida attacked the thunderous opening of O my blacke Soule with an air of desperate terror, establishing the bleak but ever-changing intensity of all nine songs.

They suit Bostridge to perfection. His voice is far richer than Pears’s, yet he shares that same agility in the high melismas so characteristic of Britten. What a performance: electrifying, stirring and in every sense a revelation.

Repeated tomorrow, 7.30pm.