Wolf Centenary Series, Wigmore Hall, London

Welcome to Wolf's lair

Singers are vulnerable, but it was Simon Keenlyside's injured body rather than his voice that prevented him from opening the Wigmore Hall's Hugo Wolf Centenary Series with Dorothea Röschmann on Sunday afternoon. In his place, the young German-born baritone Stephan Loges winner of the Wigmore's own song competition in 1999, stepped in and ensured that the programme went ahead pretty much as planned.

The recital, drawn from Wolf's 53 settings of the Romantic poet Eduard Mörike, was a sensible length – that is to say, not too long – with each singer contributing about six songs in a block in each half, thus offstage when not singing: much neater, that, than having them sit about onstage, pretending to appreciate their colleague.

Röschmann, currently Pamina in the Royal Opera's Die Zauberflöte, began with some of the best-known of the Mörike songs. Her soprano is at once plummy and slim, pumped from the stomach, and very agile, always dead in tune. It is a very "trained" voice, though, and I cannot associate it with innocence or simplicity. Never mind, she negotiated her strenuous opening song, "Im Frühling", very well indeed, with a lovely secretive shading to the lines about closed eyes and open ears. She was absolutely secure, too, in the meditation on the Nativity in "Auf ein altes Bild".

Malcolm Martineau set the scene beautifully at the piano, but he was surely a bit too restrained in the overflowing coda of "Er ist's". Indeed, more could have been heard of him throughout the afternoon, and the piano lid should have been fully open, for Wolf's piano parts are just as important as the voice. In fact, they often supply what the voice fails to make explicit, or anticipate it.

Stepping in at short notice, Loges may be excused a certain caution, though having heard him many times, I must say mildness seems essential to his nature. The voice itself is round and warm, without any idiosyncracies or difficulties in production. He was a bit inhibited in "An die Geliebte", and needed more bite in "Der Jäger", but he came to life in "Lied eines Verliebten".

"Auf einer Wanderung", a song that appropriately keeps twisting and turning until the radiant broadening of its close, had obviously been very carefully considered and prepared by Martineau; but it seemed too studied, lacking spontaneity, and Loges could hardly supply the missing sense of continuity. But it was Martineau rather than Loges who gave all the poetic clues in "Heimweh", and the singer almost disappeared in the fourth verse of the thrilling and mysterious "Der Feuerreiter", even though Martineau did his very best to be discreet.

The final group brought Röschmann back again, and better than ever. "Lebe wohl", "Agnes", and "Das verlassene Mägdlein" all tested her powers to express grief and pathos, mainly in sustained quiet singing, before an abrupt change to a sharper mood in "Nixe Binsefuss". In "Rat einer Alten", she exaggerated her natural plumminess to suggest, brilliantly, a bossy old woman, and finally threw herself into "Erstes Liebeslied" with almost hysterical abandon.