Baritone Huw Montague Rendall and pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson present an evening of searching song, opening with Ralph Vaughan Williams's beloved Songs of Travel — settings of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry that follow a wanderer's journey through the English countryside and beyond. The program continues with Jonathan Dove's Three Love Songs, works of lyricism and harmonic freshness from one of Britain's most gifted and approachable contemporary composers, before turning to Arnold Schoenberg's Vier Lieder — intimate and harmonically adventurous songs that find the composer at a pivotal moment of transition, one foot still in the lush world of late Romanticism, the other reaching boldly toward a new musical language.

The evening culminates in one of the great song cycles of the orchestral repertoire: Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen — Songs of a Wayfarer — here performed in the rarely heard but deeply rewarding version for voice and piano. This aching set, written in the shadow of a lost love, follows its wanderer through grief and fleeting consolation, ultimately finding a kind of bittersweet peace beneath a linden tree. Rendall, whose voice combines natural warmth with keen interpretive intelligence, is ideally suited to this music of restless longing, and Matheson's pianism ensures that every nuance and poetic image finds its full expression.