It was a great joy to be physically in the beautiful Holywell Room for this concert. Last year’s Zooming on a small screen was simply not the same. Another tangential delight was to be sealed in room with nothing but the splendid work of Ailish Tynan (soprano) and Libby Burgess (piano) on a day when the national news was ricocheting every few minutes and the Prime Minister had resigned by the end of the concert.

This year’s Oxford Lied Festival is themed under the heading Friendship in Song: an intimate art and four of this week’s concerts have links with Ralph Vaughan Williams, the 150th anniversary of whose birth fell earlier this month.

Vaughan Williams: Perspectives 3 opened with set of four songs by Hubert Parry, one of RVW’s teachers. Tynan is an outstanding communicator with whom every song tells a story – she acts very convincingly with her eyes, hands and body as well, obviously, as her voice. She brought, for example, vibrant excitement to the setting of Christina Rossetti’s My Heart is like a Singing Bird, contrasting, almost coy, contrasting lyrical calm to Shelley’s Good Night and lots of wit and cheeky looks in Shakespeare’s Crabbed Age and Youth.

Libby Burgess meanwhile duetting from the piano (I really am very glad the word “accompanist” seems to obsolescent) breathes the music almost as much as Tynan does. And it’s interesting to see her play the whole concert from an iPad with a Bluetooth pedal to turn the pages. I particularly liked her playing of the elegant rippling piano line in the last of four songs by Rebecca Clarke (worked with RVW) which followed the Parry.

Their performance of Stanford’s (he taught RVW too) setting of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci was a high spot. Tynan really made the descending minor arpeggios evocatively mysterious and then leaned on the dramatic contrast into the major key.

Four songs by Vaughan Williams – all settings of poems by his second wife, Ursula – were another pleasure. Tynan really made us notice the words “I shall remember firelight on your sleepy face” and I admired the wistful affection she found in Hands Eyes and Heart.

The concert ended with arrangements of four songs by Mr/Mrs/Ms Trad – another of RVW’s dearest friends. Of these I liked Britten’s setting of The Ash Grove best. The melody is very simple and familiar but the gradually thickening, busy counterpoint on piano is not and Burgess did it real justice.

Tynan, of course, is Irish and for the last song Tigaree Torun Orum arranged by Hughes, she used her native accent and a sung version of Irish blarney at top speed. It was funny and a fine piece of musical acting – culminating in an unexpected operatically dramatic top note so that the concert ended – literally – on a high.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only audience member who, after all that, was quite sorry to leave this musical oasis to face the reality of national events.

Susan Elkin