STRICTLY speaking, some of what follows belongs not in the context of a concert review, but in a broader, more discursive space.

However, as the two people who raised the issue in a chat after their performance on Tuesday night in Perth happen to be one of Britain's finest tenors, James Gilchrist, and his accompanist, the superlative pianist Anna Tilbrook, I feel a certain responsibility to reflect their views here.

And those views are relevant to their outstanding, harrowing and heartbreaking performances of Beethoven's song cycle, An die ferne geliebte, the Immortal Beloved songs and the first real song cycle, Britten's Winter Words cycle, and the greatest of all Romantic song cycles, Schumann's Dichterliebe, on which the immaculate duo of Gilchrist and Tilbrook lavished their profound emotional and psychological acuity in a shattering account of Schumann's tender, heart-rending vision of a poet's life and love.

The concert was very sparsely attended. The performers just got on with it in the good-natured manner of the professionals they are. But they did have questions. "What is the problem with song?" Both alleged apparent reluctance in the plethora of British music clubs and societies to take on singers. Pianist Tilbrook was explicit in saying that if they were a string quartet or other instrumental group they would sail onto the playlists. But a vocalist with an accompanist and a programme of song seems to be another matter.

This was a wonderful, top-drawer concert by two supreme artists who are not intrinsically provocateurs, but who, none the less, raised some fundamental questions that should perhaps be chewed over and addressed by regional UK promoters.

HHHHH