Ian Bostridge & friends, Barbican Hall, London

Though he acknowledged his debt to Purcell's Divine Hymns, Benjamin Britten thought his Canticles essentially "a new invention" – a flexible small-scale cantata-like concept for one or more soloists with one accompanying and perhaps one obligato instrument, setting quasi-sacred texts of whatever form and length. He composed five, from 1947 to 1974, but there is little indication that he planned them as a linked sequence, or would have approved of the present fashion for programming them as such.

Despite variously coloured lighting and the suppression of applause, the latest attempt by Ian Bostridge and associates tended to show up the disparities between the pieces. In the order Britten wrote them, the Canticles neither lead musically one into another, nor quite balance as a sequence of contrasts. And Bostridge's tenor line, the one element common to all five, seemed to reflect this in its unevenness: less than ideally focused in the Purcellian Canticle I: "My Beloved is Mine", and rather disengaged in Canticle II: "Abraham and Isaac", in which he was joined by the not very boyish-sounding counter tenor, David Daniels.

It was in Canticle III: "Still Falls the Rain", Britten's haunting rescue job on some dubious Edith Sitwell verse, that Bost-ridge's anguished stage persona and keening timbre found its mark, alternating with Timothy Brown's plangent obligato horn; and again in the TS Eliot setting of Canticle V: "The Death of Saint Narcissus", in which Julius Drake's solicitous piano accompaniment of the first four canticles gave way to Skaila Kanga's lustrous harp.

The intervening Canticle IV: "Journey of the Magi", in which the young baritone Christopher Maltman joined Daniels and Bostridge, received a well-balanced account that, in this repetitious Eliot setting, could not quite refute the complaints about Britten's mannerism.

We heard four of his best-loved folk-song settings pleasantly sung by Daniels, but the unexpected high point of the concert was its opening item, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Unexpected, because this lengthy cycle has often puzzled in the way its greyly chromatic idiom somehow fails to match the moments of vision that flash out from even Blake's grimmest texts. Mesmerically still of presence yet somehow nuancing every word and musical phrase, ranging vocally from the most implacable declamation to a fined-down tone that drew every ear in intense concentration, Maltman delivered a performance that could only be called revelatory.