100 Years of German Song, 1810-1910, Schade, Martineau, Wigmore Hall

As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country.

Few of those who were present last night will quarrel, I hope, with the description of Michael Schade's considered dash through German Lieder in its glorious infancy as exquisite. For, though Schade's vocal tone, taken on its own, devoid of the other ingredients, might not be considered by some to be the sweetest or fullest or most rounded you'll ever hear, it is certainly one of the most satisfying, in terms of character, conviction and control, when deployed musically.

Many of you might, however, be mystified as to how this programme - a chronological survey of German song, from 1810 to 1910, to be given in instalments over the next year (and tonight we got the first tranche: 1810 to 1820) - could be described as innovative. Well, the return of chronology - in musical programming as much as in Mr Gove's new coalition classroom - is innovative. For the past few decades it has been fashionable to imagine that we gain more through thematic relationships than chronological ones. In fact the reverse is true.

Consider one year: 1868. The year that Die Meistersinger is premiered, Rossini dies and Tchaikovsky pens his First Symphony. The number of intriguing avenues opened up by these simple facts should not be overlooked. Or consider one composer: Schubert. Trudge loyally and microscopically and with strict chronology through Hyperion's invaluable Schubert song cycle set and you'll pick up a wealth of informational riches that could never be found any other way. Chronology gives you the answer to most musical whys, whats and whens; themes will tell you more about the thematiser than the music that's being themed.

So stuff themes. Chronology is where it's at.

And so it was last night. Almost. I could, to be honest, have done with an even more anally year-by-year exposition than was laid out before us. But, still, one learnt. One learnt about the development of Beethoven the man, as one followed the growth of his musical character from the relatively sociable animal that he seems to be in the Goethe songs of 1810, Op 83, that revel in the sentimentality of romance and heartbreak through to the unsettled despair that he hits in An die Hoffnung (To Hope) of 1816 and then into the philosophical mud that he will wallow in (not entirely sympathetically) in Abendlied untern gestirnten Himmel (Evening song beneath a starry sky) (1820), WoO150, towards the end of his life.

One learnt how Weber, writing within cleverly economical means in Abschied vom Leben (Farewell to life), Op 41, No 2, was both recovering and breaking down classical traditions. (Abschied seems solely to be built on Mozartian transitions.) And it was perhaps unsurprising to see Schade unfazed by the bareness of the vocal lines in this and the two previous Beethoven songs, despite the challenges of the very high, soft writing of the Weber and the meandering recitative of the Beethoven. Water off a duck's back for a Mozartian like Schade, I suspect.

From the four forlorn Jan Václav Tomášek settings of Goethe from 1815 we learnt how much the Gothic quality that so many of Schubert's compositions are stewed in was more generally in the air in Central Europe. At the most unexpected moments and in the most unexpected of contexts, Tomášek whips out line upon line of great chromatic instability, almost out-Schubert-ing Schubert. Schade again was extraordinary in adding a three-dimensionality to character and narrative through dynamic control. Is there a more beautiful sotto voce than Schade's, I began to wonder?

The highlight was a rendition of Beethoven's An die ferne Gelibete, Op 98, that came just before the interval. Responsibility for this lay as much with accompanist Malcolm Martineau as Schade. Martineau interfered with Schade's vocal path in the most beautiful way, building up a cumulative power over the first five songs as if we were traversing Op 111. Schade's soft incantation in the second song was as welcome as a summer's breeze. His control in the final verse of the final song, in which he balanced a breathless passion with an impassioned breathfulness, was breathless.

The second half of Schubert songs, mostly taken from his annus mirabilis of 1815, were a medley of gems. Now all of 18 years old, Schubert strikes out in several directions, increasingly unafraid about breaking and reshaping the forms he's learnt in order to accommodate the vagaries of life: one foot on strophic land, one foot in the heavens. We started with five portraits of night: night as a delight (Die Sommernacht, D289), night as a fright (Hölty's An den Mond, D139, and Mayrhofer's Nachtstück, D672) and night as a vehicle for love (Goethe's An den Mond, D259). Then came four on loss - including the story of the poor angler in Der Fischer, D225 - all settings of Goethe that Schade played almost as little cautionary tales. Then to end, five on renewal, on spring and love restored in An Sie (To Her), D288, in which a little scamp of a scale is transformed into a cascade of joy in the final ever-popular Seligkeit (Bliss), D 433.

You could be forgiven in thinking Schade deployed his formidable acting skills but little in the course of the evening: a small scratch of the cheek here, a brief clench of the teeth there, a small waggle of a finger. But of course that's all these songs need. That, conviction and restraint. And, don't be fooled, performative skill is still needed to convince and restrain. The result was a performance of such transfixing beauty that I can think of no one in Britain who could have invested the same sort of quiet energy in these pieces, and projected so much meaning with so little effort.

And, to return to my first point, why do state subsidy cuts make a concert like this more likely? Because no musical organisation that is lashed to the mast of state targets and social efficacy (to borrow Ed Miliband's vivid image from today's PMQs) would be able to put on such a genuinely counter-cultural series for an audience as white and old and appreciative as the one I witnessed at the Wigmore Hall last night. So bring on the cuts, I say.