MUSIC / Dressed to impress: Adrian Jack reviews Matthias Gorne at the Wigmore Hall

The Wigmore Hall rarely heralds its events with hyperbole, but Matthias Gorne was announced on Tuesday as 'an outstanding new Lieder singer', and his recital devoted to Schubert's complete Schwanengesang, prefaced by five settings of Seidl, was sold out.

Gorne studied with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and has stood in for Fischer-Dieskau on more than one occasion. Armed with these daunting testimonials, this 27- year-old German was all set to impress, and he did. His stage manner was not graceful, nor are his looks likely to charm a bouncer, but if you shut your eyes, or kept them on the words, the songs were brought vividly to life.

At least, the voice parts were, for the pianist Irwin Gage merely provided a monochrome mumble in the background. Admittedly, in 'Bei dir allein', the pianist does not provide much more than a cushion for the voice, while in 'Die Stadt' it sets the scene by evoking the gentle ripple of water. But in 'Sehnsucht', Gage needed to contribute something to the urgency which Gorne worked so hard to express. Nor did Gage's flaccid pulse create, in 'Liebesbotschaft', the delicate buoyancy which would have transformed Gorne's singing into a complete performance of the song.

Yet in the baleful stagyness of 'Kriegers Ahnung', despite a piano part which was much too light-weight, Gorne managed to create the widest possible range of feeling in a brief timespan, giving each short verse a distinct character, growing more intense until the resignation of the ending. Similarly, 'Der Doppelganger' unfolded with a fresh sense of revelation, as if he, like us, wasn't to know the truth until the very end.

Describing voices is almost as hard, and as misleading, as conveying a flavour. Gorne's baritone is warm and rounded, with a similar, slightly boxy head register to Fischer-Dieskau's, but also without his teacher's touch of narcissism - that sometimes excessive sense of the singer savouring the beauty of his own sound. Gorne needn't fear the comparison, because he can already make everything his own, and his priority is obviously to communicate the sense of the words rather than merely to sound polished.

Currently, there seem to be more first-class lyric baritones excelling in Lieder than any other kind of singer, but even at his tender age, Gorne is ready to take his place among the best. His singing seems totally flexible and, at least in this repertoire, there is no limit to his ability to characterise every imaginable mood.

Audiences at this kind of recital are relatively dignified, but this one went as wild as it could.