Talking to the audience at encore time, the soprano Christiane Karg described her recital as a "journey", and she had indeed taken us on an extraordinary one, both musically and emotionally. The pleasures and sorrows of travel as metaphor for the restlessness of the human condition was her theme. Her programme, meanwhile, allowed her to traverse an exceptionally complex stylistic range, which she did in ways that often came close to perfection.

She began with Hugo Wolf's Kennst du das Land, with its nostalgia for an edenic lost Italy, and closed, two hours later, with Henri Duparc's setting of a French translation of the same text. In the first half, she followed Wolf from Italy to Spain, before tackling Manuel de Falla's Seven Popular Spanish Songs. After the interval came French composers abroad: Ravel and Hahn in Greece, modern and ancient respectively; Koechlin in the Middle East; and Poulenc in London.

Karg's recent UK appearances have tended to suggest a specialism in baroque music, yet she is perfectly at ease in lieder. Her voice sounds opulent in the Wigmore, though a hint of metal in the tone, carefully deployed, permits her infinite dramatic potential. There's an uninhibited quality to her singing – her Wolf was all about grand passions rather than nuanced half-tones.

Her hovering, smoky pianissimo takes your breath away, but gains its meaning through its context: in Falla's Lullaby it sounds infinitely maternal and intimate; transferred to the melismatic filigree of Ravel's Cinq Mélodies Populaires Grecques, it sounds provocatively sensual. Falla's Polo exposes an occasional lack of weight and grit in her lower registers, but this is a minor flaw when placed beside the richness of her achievement. Pianist Wolfram Rieger was the ideal accompanist, clear and dexterous, wonderfully supportive but unobtrusive.