Several years ago, an athletic and barefoot Simon Keenlyside sang and danced his way through a sinuously staged version of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Barbican, choreographed by Trisha Brown, that defied easy categorisation and doubtless upset the conservative purists.

Now, more than a decade on, Keenlyside returned to the concert platform with the great song cycle in its more traditional format, this time with only his deeply sensitive accompanist Emanuel Ax for company. Nevertheless, something of that earlier version of Schubert’s winter journey remained in this recital, with the baritone drawing discreetly on his great actorly abilities, occasionally pacing the platform, looking up to the heavens and, finally and most theatrically of all, stepping forward to the front of the stage for a motionless delivery of the bleakest of bleak final songs.

Yet Keenlyside’s Winterreise is not in any sense a thing of gimmicks. If the voice showed occasional strain at the very top of the register, in songs like Loneliness or The Linden Tree, this was invariably to underline some poignant point in Schubert’s haunting settings of Wilhelm Müller’s lonely texts. In the lower part of his range, notably in such songs as Frozen Tears and the defiant third-from-last, Courage, Keenlyside was magnificently and even frighteningly authoritative, while the dramatic urgency of Numbness, On the River and The Inn was grippingly delivered.

Ax was, for the most part, a self-effacing companion on Keenlyside’s journey, reluctant to draw attention away from the baritone. The pianist’s beautifully judged tone was a constant source of pleasure but also a reminder that the accompanist can in some senses represent the orderly world that the singer is leaving behind. As in every other aspect of this deeply serious evening, there was a thought-out artistic purpose at each twist and turn; it is hard to recall a more numbed conclusion than the one these artists achieved as the organ-grinder’s tune died on the edge of the void.