During the recent Oxford Lieder Festival, Ian Partridge urged the students in his master class not to neglect song. Elizabeth Watts’s concert at the Jacqueline du Pré building last Friday would have thrilled him. She is an award-winning young singer with a growing operatic career who is also increasingly sought after as a recitalist.

Watts, and her accompanist Gary Matthewman, performed a varied programme of works by Mozart, Liszt, Schubert, Gurney, Head and Quilter. The temper ranged from wit and irony to heartfelt longing and despair. Watts’s rich, resonant voice is capable of conveying fine shades of emotion and she displayed her powers of characterisation to winning effect, the text always the centre of focus. Matthewman’s playing was sensitive and responsive throughout.

The pieces featured in the concert were well selected including some rarities. Mozart is hardly celebrated for his songs, though many of them are delightful. Liszt’s songs are not often heard but deserve to be much better known, with their bold piano effects contrasting beautifully with the lyrical vocal writing. Oh! Quand je dors is exquisite. The choice of Schubert lieder contained some lesser known but beautiful pieces which Watts has just recorded with Roger Vignoles. Several of these I had not heard before and they are real gems. The CD is worth buying just to hear Nähe des Geliebten, Thekla and Die Männer sind mechant.

The two Gurney songs Spring and Sleep — from his setting of five Elizabethan lyrics — are demanding technically but Watts showed a confident mastery of the music. She was equally at home in the innocent, folk-influenced songs of Michael Head and in the Quilter. For an encore we heard Schubert’s Die Forelle. My only gripe is that the size of the print in the programme was so small it was impossible to follow the text during the concert.

Elizabeth Watts’s recording of Schubert is available on Sony from Monday.