Take the humble song out of the recital room and into the big concert halls and you have two options. A few weeks ago Dmitri Hvorostovsky took up the gauntlet at the Barbican, using a big voice and a big personality to brighten his Russian ballads with the sheer glow of star-power. But when Magdalena Kozená brought her Czech songbook to town, she did it differently: what shone the brightest in this bewitching evening were the words that she sang.

That's probably because nothing is taken for granted when Kozená returns to her roots. She ekes out huge extremes of expression, without any of it ever seeming unnatural or misplaced. There are none of the mannerisms or gawkiness that can mar her performances, but each song is milked for all that it is worth.

The set by Erwin Schulhoff - a composer who should be better known, and who no doubt would have been if his life had not ended in a concentration camp - was a case in point. There was plenty of quirk in these wry folk-songs, but the hint of heartbreak too in Kozená's fiercely nuanced and technically flawless singing. Accompanying, a majestic Malcolm Martineau was never better than here, partly since Schulhoff gives the piano equal honours by supplying some startling syncopation and, in I Want to Dance the Cossack Dance, an extended postlude in which the narrator clearly gets her way.

Monotony - always a danger in these monocultural recitals - rarely looked likely. Petr Eben's solemn and spare love-poems were as daringly focused as Novák's more operatic pieces were rich and wild. A drift into Moravian dialect uncovered the clipped and direct idiom of Janácek, but if these were miniatures, then they had deep pockets.

So could the one familiar item on the list, Dvorák's plangent Songs My Mother Taught Me, really cast its spell in this varied company? It certainly could: in choosing to guide its second verse from a beautifully controlled pianissimo to an ecstatic and impulsive forte, Kozená marked the song's iconic status as well as proving that it could still sound entirely spontaneous. An awestruck hush from the stalls told the rest of the story.

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