Rozario/De Saram/Drake, Drapers' Hall, London

Appearing in a spangled midnight-blue sari in the mock-Renaissance grandeur of Drapers' Hall, the soprano Patricia Rozario was building bridges, and not only between Art and Mammon. Her aim was to bring the musics of Europe and Asia together under the banner that Daniel Barenboim has commandeered: a West-Eastern Divan.

But Rozario's programme began by taking that phrase back to its source: Goethe's title for his great collection of poems in which he used the verse-forms of both continents, and Rozario opened with a series of lieder based on some of the poems. We heard versions of "Suleika" – a romantic lament framed by an Islamic conceit – by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, plus two other Schubert songs in which his creative imagination pushed musical ideas to their limit.

Rozario's performance was intensely musical, and the higher she went, the more beautiful she sounded, but she didn't seem to be in her element with this quintessentially German music. Like most lieder, these songs are about sex, and are primarily pitched in the middle register, but hers has little colour or warmth. Though ably accompanied by Julius Drake, she also wasn't helped by the piano: her light voice needed something less beefy than a Steinway grand, particularly with its lid open.

But the rest of her recital, in which she was joined by cellist Rohan de Saram, was superb. First she and De Saram performed "Wheeling Past the Stars", a song cycle newly written for them by Param Vir to poems by Tagore: ruminations on life and death, nature, the universe, in which Tagore's wayward stream of consciousness was reflected in Vir's wayward tonality. But it was when they launched into John Tavener's Akhmatova Songs that things caught fire.

Written for Rozario, and tailored to her ability to run the gamut from dread to ecstasy, the songs had a disturbing resonance. Akhmatova lets huge, threatening shapes emerge from the juxtaposition of banal-seeming images: Tavener's music, delivered through Rozario's subtle, suggestive art, shadowed the poetry's every movement.

Michael Church

The City of London Festival runs to 10 July (www.colf.org/)