"I know I shouldn't, but I will," said Amanda Roocroft, abandoning herself to the guilty pleasure of nattering to the audience. Some singers like to engage in repartee by way of introducing their material. Roocroft, for her part, is a veritable chatterbox, ready to talk to everyone about everything.

Even before she'd sung a note, she regaled us with a tale about how faulty brakes on a piano caused it to move when she leaned against it, nearly depositing her on the floor. Thereafter, the first half of her recital was full of anecdotes about why Peter Cornelius's deadly serious Warum Sind Denn Die Rosen So Blass made her want to giggle, what her son thought of her in The Merry Widow and how Liszt's Die Drei Zigeuner "just gets me every time".

The evening was memorable, however, not so much for the banter as for the fact that Roocroft, prone to variability, was on splendid vocal form. Part of the Wigmore's Decade By Decade series, the recital covered songs written between 1860 and 1870, a period dominated by Brahms and Liszt, although the programme, the brainchild of pianist Malcolm Martineau, also featured music by their lesser-known acolytes and successors.

It was a repertoire much suited to Roocroft's plush tone and non-interventionist delivery. She has the right whiff of theatricality for Liszt. His adherents, Cornelius and Adolf Jensen, deal in long chromatic lines where her voice ebbed and flowed sumptuously. The smile in her tone, meanwhile, robs Brahms of his earnestness: she was delightful in Sonntag above all. Martineau, meanwhile, was outstanding. "He's going to show off now – listen to this," Roocroft remarked before he swung into Liszt in Hungarian national mode. This was virtuosic stuff, perfectly done.