OUTSIDE London and some specialist festivals, Lieder recitals are becoming something of an endangered species. So it seemed courageous of Ryedale to programme one. But when you are able to deliver a soprano of Christiane Karg’s calibre you are not taking risks.

Sandwiching her appearance between headlining in Mozart at Glyndebourne, on the eve of an emergency summons to Munich, she might be excused for being preoccupied. But it was as if Ryedale was the only place in the world she could wish to be.

Not only that. She established such immediate and total rapport with her audience that we were eating out of her hand before she had finished her opening salvo, Schoeck’s In Memoriam. It established the evening’s theme: memories, death, rebirth, new beginnings and expectations.

Karg is the complete package. She looks right into the eyes of her listeners. She exudes a delightful, unfussy charisma. If she has any technical problems, they are totally hidden. Her creamy legato and impeccable diction are riveting. She was engagingly contained in four songs from Wolf’s Spanish Songbook. Her tone was beautifully internalised, too, in five Baudelaire settings by Debussy, singing as if within a trance in Le Jet d’Eau, and devastatingly accurate in her octave leap to finish Recueillement (recollection).

A Brahmsian group of early Schoenberg was prelude to Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Rapturous in Spring, she conjured an immediate, rueful remembrance in September, while making an unearthly dream of Twilight, turning to focus on Christopher Glynn’s lark-tinged postlude. He had been tightly attuned to her throughout. Lieder recitals should always be like this.