Romantic composers have always been drawn to the South: to warmth, to emotional and sexual freedom, to Goethe’s land where lemon trees bloom. Tonight these same composers look in the other direction: to the colder North, where castles sit on rocky crags, where bloody feuds are fought, where dark forests hide darker dealings.

Sibelius is our northern-most composer – his most famous song a blood curdling conversation between mother and daughter. Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Lady of the Lake was the inspiration behind Rossini’s Donna del lago. Scott’s heroine Ellen was also given a voice by Schubert, who planned, but never finished, a major collection of songs around the Scottish poet, sensing the Viennese public’s appetite for this landscape. Not every young soprano singing Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ at their best friend’s wedding realises her character should actually be sat, forlorn, in a cave in the Trossachs.

Schumann, meanwhile, was Robert Burns’s biggest fan: the only poet he set more was Heinrich Heine. Adolf Jensen was prolific too, drawn to Burns’s warmth and emotional clarity. Loewe’s ‘Tom der Reimer’ is a tongue in cheek masterpiece, a parable of woman’s sexual power in the face of blundering male stupidity.

Nearer home, Francis George Scott is a fascinating, underrated composer, writing Bartok-influenced music in Scotland the 1920s, acclaimed in Europe but ignored in London. With his friend (and former pupil) the poet Hugh Macdiarmid, Scott tried to forge a uniquely Scottish soundworld. Often witty, often incomprehensible even to Scottish audiences, his songs boast a rare primal energy.

Judith Weir has been drawn to Scottish ballads in various song collections, most notably her Scotch Minstrelsy. Like Scott, she finds a musical language that balances grimness with a light touch. We end with an affectionate Burnsian tribute from Guildhall School’s very own Roderick Williams – on this occasion wearing the wig of Kapellmeister Bach.

–Iain Burnside