Mignon, an impoverished Gypsy girl forced to work in a circus, has only a bit part in Goethe's grand narrative Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. But her myth was perpetuated by artists from Schubert to Walter Scott, and the Leeds Lieder festival featured a series of recitals exploring the impact of the enigmatic Gypsy on the romantic imagination.

The brilliant young Bavarian soprano Christiane Karg brought sumptuous tone and a glittering top register to Hugo Wolf's suite of four Mignon Lieder; though the highlight was Henri Duparc's plaintive expression of unrequited passion. In the words of a more recent addition to the Mignon canon – Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus – Karg "seized hold of the song in the supple lasso of her voice".

Canadian soprano Martha Guth couldn't quite match that for expressivity of tone, though her programme included four different settings of Mignon's song Only Those Who Know What Loving Is. Tchaikovsky's emerged as dark and introspective, Schumann's as light and limpid and Schubert's a compelling monodrama that packs more psychological shifts into three minutes than some operas manage in three hours. But they all paled beside Wolf's version, a dissonant howl that curtails so suddenly that accompanist Graham Johnson had to hit the damping pedal as if performing an emergency braking procedure.

Mezzo Anna Huntley is a fast-rising British talent who brought an impressive bloom to the premiere of Alec Roth's Garden Songs, based on the poems of Amy Lowell. The words have such an onomatopoeic content they practically set themselves ("Scrape of insect violins/ Through the stubble shrilly dins"), though Roth wove beguiling, jazzy textures embellished by outbreaks of scat. Huntley and her exemplary accompanist, James Baillieu, also dug out a delightfully daft Joyce Grenfell ditty, written to amuse her friend Benjamin Britten in 1967.

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