Psophos Quartet/ Cooper/ Kirchhoff, Wigmore Hall, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fivestar -->

Voice + piano = singing + accompaniment... right? If you're talking about the Wigmore, 99 times out of 100 the answer is yes. But here comes that 100th time, with what feels like a brand-new classical art form: music plus speech. But it isn't new; it's just been forgotten. The ancient Greeks used it, and it was rediscovered and dubbed "melodrama" in 18th-century Germany, with Beethoven and Weber trading on it to haunting effect in Fidelio and Der Freischütz. Mozart was so impressed by it that he wove it into his early opera, Zaide, which gets a rare outing at the Barbican next week. In these cases, however, the elements are interwoven but heard separately: only with the inventive Robert Schumann were they heard together.

Schumann described his "poems for declamation with pianoforte" as reflecting the way ballads were delivered en famille, but his publisher rejected them as "unsuitable". Enter the German actress, Corinna Kirchhoff, star of the Burgtheater in Vienna, who held the Wigmore stage with a dramatic attitude reminiscent of Victorian theatrical prints.

Fair Hedwig was the title of the first poem, which tells of a noble knight spotting a comely serving-wench and triumphantly bearing her off to the altar with Kirchhoff's style at once dramatic and ironical. Next came a gruesome ballad telling of a moorland boy who foresees his murder in a dream; then came a musicalisation of Shelley's The Fugitives.

Schumann's contribution, played by Imogen Cooper, was a bit like that of the piano in a silent film: by turns underscoring the drama, leading it, and echoing it, but the result was definitely an enrichment.

If that was the pièce de résistance, the rest of this concert by Cooper and the Paris-based Psophos Quartet - four young women in identical black ball-gowns - offered further anniversary tribute to Schumann's genius.

Young the quartet may be, but these players' symbiosis was exemplary. On the other hand, the performance of the Piano Quintet, with which the concert ended, suggested that pianist and string-players had not had time to get to know each other.