Last Saturday the Goethe Institut marked the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth with a recital of songs and readings. Peter Janowsky opened and closed the proceedings in German, and the songs were interspersed with eight readings in English. While the music enhanced the texts, the translations diminished them and it would have been preferable to have had all the readings in German, in which language Jankowsky is naturally most forceful and persuasive.

Texts and translations, indispensable when tribute is being paid to a poet in a foreign language, were at hand; but at the performers' request were withheld until the recital was over. This averted the disturbance of rustling paper but deprived the listeners, to a certain extent, of Goethe's contribution, nor could they appreciate the great artistry with which Conor Biggs wedded words and music, finding an appropriate vocal colour for each word.

This was most immediately evident in Erlkonig (one of the five Schubert settings) where the four characters - narrator, father, son, and erlking - have to be differentiated, and in Flohlied des Mephisto (one of the three Beethoven settings) where the humour needs to be pointed.

Biggs can act with his voice alone and Schubert's rarely heard setting of the Cathedral Scene from Goethe's Faust gave further proof of his skill, but most impressive of all were those philosophical poems of the younger Goethe, Prome- theus and Grenzen der Menschheit. In these, Biggs's bass register, sympathetically and firmly supported by Padhraic O Cuinneagain at the piano, was at one with the profundity of the thought.

The five Schumann settings which ended the programme were slight in comparison and would have fared better in an all Schumann programme. The texts originated in an unconsummated affair between the 65-year-old poet and a woman of 30, and were informatively and entertainingly introduced by Jankowsky.