‘In the last couple of years I’ve done quite a lot of recitals with harp, rather than the more usual piano,” Dame Felicity Lott told me in an Oxford Times interview. She added: “That’s really interesting, because it gives you a lot more freedom to experiment with colour, sound, and less decibels. It’s a bit naked, mind you, there’s nowhere to hide at all!”

In her Oxford Lieder Festival recital, Dame Felicity tried something even more naked and exposed: accompaniment from a guitar. She began with a selection of John Dowland songs, colouring Fine Knacks for Ladies with the evocative tone of a market stall holder pitching his wares, and delicately shading the line “To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die” in Come Again, Sweet Love. Already Dame Felicity was demonstrating the apparent ease with which she suspends a musical line, and her mastery of breath control. Yet she also seemed oddly ill at ease at times in these songs, as if not quite confident that all was going well.

It was in the following group of Mozart songs that a significant problem really emerged. Now into much-loved musical territory, Dame Felicity began to take off, with the full range of colour and musical expression for which she is famous becoming increasingly evident. The problem was that her guitar accompanist, Christoph Denoth, didn’t take off with her. Possibly through lack of rehearsal opportunities, no chemistry seemed to have developed between the two performers. Frustratingly, Denoth demonstrated that he is a superb player in his own right, giving a vividly coloured performance of Fernando Sor’s Variations on “Ye banks and braes o’bonnie Doune”.

Dame Felicity hit her peak in a group of Haydn songs, including a hilarious performance of Mother’s Tardy Arrival, while her love of storytelling was evident in a concluding selection of works by Schubert.