Few young singers make a UK recital debut like Lise Davidsen’s. But then, few singers come to that debut with such a weight of reputation and expectation. Taking not only the First Prize but also the Audience Prize and Birgit Nilsson Awards at 2015’s Operalia competition, established the then 28-year-old Norwegian soprano as one to watch.

As a scan through the 17-year list of Rosenblatt Recitals quickly reveals, sopranos and tenors come and (often as not) go. Much rarer is the opportunity to enjoy the gifts of a mezzo-soprano near the start of what should, all things being equal, be a long and illustrious career.

It felt oddly disrespectful showing up in time for Schumann's wake on the fifteenth and final day of this year's Oxford Lieder Festival. Having started with the early piano music and many of the chamber works before moving on to Schumann's annus mirabilis of song, 1840, with frequent leaps backwards to influences and forwards to the influenced, pianist Sholto Kynoch’s labour of love reached the troubled final years dogged by whatever that insanity for which Schumann was institutionalised might have been – bipolarity, syphilis, poisoning for the mercury used in its treatment.

In the Wigmore's Lieder prayer meetings, baritone Christian Gerhaher is the high priest. There are good reasons for this, but given that the innermost circle of Wigmore Friends pack out his concerts, you do feel that the slightest criticism might merit lynching by the ecstatic communicants. His Schubert is never less than fascinating, but 2011's Winterreise kept its distance, while last night there were more question marks hovering over a Schubertiade of mostly semi-precious stones and only the odd jewel.

Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.

Temple Music's enterprising song series, directed by pianist Julius Drake, brought a welcome rarity to Middle Temple Hall last night. Schumann's Myrthen, the garland of twenty-six songs dedicated to his intended bride Clara Wieck, are seldom heard in a complete performance. Even with an interval in the middle, they serve as a reminder of the power and sheer emotional range of Schumann's music. These songs were almost certainly the catalyst which set in motion the composer's miraculous 'Liederjahr' of 1840, in which he wrote virtually 140 solo songs and duets with piano.

“I feel so alone I could cry”. As the keynote of Adam Smallbone’s Passion in the breathtaking third series of Rev, that unspoken sentiment provided a passacaglia bass line to the failure of St Saviour’s. Made explicit In the mouths of possibly 600 Londoners just around the corner from that noble edifice, in reality the relatively thriving St Leonard’s Shoreditch, it felt paradoxically uplifting and – I feel myself sucked in to use the word now that I'm signed up to Spitalfields hip – empowering.

Of Schubert’s two great cycles, the youthful ardour of Die schöne Müllerin sits best with a tenor while the bleak wretchedness of Winterreise lends itself to the baritone voice. These, of course, are personal prejudices, for both works can be sung in either range (and indeed beyond, as the presence in the Wigmore Hall audience of a leading female exponent of Winterreise, Alice Coote, reminded us), but it’s what experience has taught me.

A rare thing indeed. A British singer/pianist duo has had the patience, and also been given the opportunities over a number of years, to own and to inhabit a thoroughly individual and intelligent interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise.

This was the first of the ten concerts in the Temple Music Society's autumn/winter season. The Society uses two venues right in the heart of London, Temple Church and, as last night, Middle Temple Hall, most famous as the site of the first performance of Twelfth Night in 1602.