The abiding image of Donald Swann was a quiet, smiling man sitting at the piano while his duo-partner Michael Flanders dropped another hat. He of course provided all the music for the songs they gave together.

But there was much more to him than that, not least as a composer, as Caroline MacPhie and Benjamin Hulett persuasively revealed in their song recital on Wednesday. Christopher Glynn’s piano accompaniments were equally illuminating.

Naturally the evening’s Flanders & Swann settings drew the applause of familiarity. They were indeed given with panache, and the audience joined in with the hippopotami. But two song-cycles from late in his life made an equally powerful impression.

Russian tints appear regularly in both, often in the piano, shades of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov that speak of Swann’s Russian immigrant parentage. But what is truly English is the melancholy often just below the surface of the vocal lines.

Elegiac, nostalgic, or sentimental, it featured regularly in his Five Colourisations of Emily Dickinson, with MacPhie’s fervent, neatly-contained soprano combining sweetly with turbulent emotion in Glynn’s piano.

There was a pleasing melancholy, too, in six William Blake settings, where Hulett’s flexible lyric tenor and clear diction penetrated to the heart of the poet’s epigrams.

Here Swann flirts with modernity, but never loses touch with his melodic flair. The singers duetted touchingly in Bilbo’s Last Song, where Tolkien’s hero awaits his final voyage. Now we need some recordings to complete the picture.