The theme of this year’s festival is ‘folksong’, and Saturday night’s recital by mezzo Susan Bickley and pianist Julius Drake interpreted and reinterpreted this idea in a host of musical ways. The beautifully crafted programme of English and French 20th-century music incorporated art songs alongside folksong arrangements, folk pastiches and even cabaret songs — surely the ‘folk’ of the 20th century. With each successive variation on the genre providing playful commentary on its fellows, the result was a dynamic musical challenge that dared its audience to answer the seemingly simple question: what is folksong?

Benjamin Britten’s Three French Folksongs opened the evening — perfect examples of the simple manipulations that transform naïve traditional melodies into nuanced and self-reflexive art song. Together with two of the composer’s English folksong arrangements, they provided a frame for the recital’s more distant musical explorations, and showed off the full emotional range of such works — from the bittersweet pastoral romance of La Belle Est Au Jardin D’Amour and O Waly Waly, to the angular pain of La Fileuse.

The musical highlights of the evening, however, were Ravel’s joyous and witty Chansons Populaires and Britten’s equally tongue-in-cheek Cabaret Songs. Showcasing Bickley’s gift for characterisation and communication, their colourful textures also worked particularly well in the intimate and rather brittle acoustic of the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, which failed to make real aural sense of Michael Berkeley’s intensely spare cycle Speaking Silence that provided the centrepiece of the concert.

Written originally for a folksong-setting contest, Ravel’s Chansons Populaires comprise four songs, each composed in the style of a different nation. Bickley’s range — both vocal and dramatic — was amply demonstrated in the energy and apparent effortlessness with which she romped from the soulful meanderings of the Chanson Hebraique to the sinuous slitherings and dusky-eyed dramatics of the Chanson Espagnole. Drake too, always a joy to hear, appeared to relish the character- acting demanded of the accompaniment, and provided both a stylistic support and a dramatic sparring partner for Bickley, as well as a masterclass for the audience in the magic that breeds when sheer musicality bridges the gaps between a singer’s intention and a pianist’s instinctive understanding.