Franz Schubert wrote an amazing 630 songs in his short life - he died aged just 31.

But his contribution to that special form of German song, the Lied, was enormous and Dorothee Jansen, soprano, is a fine interpreter of his work.

On Sunday, she returned to The Deanery, Winchester, for the third time and gave a splendid recital of 22 of the composer's songs, grouped together as the Therese Grob songbook, written in honour of the composer's girlfriend.

Inevitably, many of the songs are of great longing. Franz and Therese were in their teens at the time and there is a bitter aftertaste from our knowledge that the composer, who was poor all his life, did not have the money to marry his love and she ended up with a master baker.

A number of the songs are settings of poems by Goethe, Schiller, Matthias Claudius and other great writers.

Some people at the concert were saying that this year, Miss Jansen had developed vocally and this may well be the case.

What definitely was noticeable, in the setting of the fine large room at The Deanery, was that you could hear every syllable. Each word was so clearly enunciated that, even though there was a translation of the German lyrics in the programme, after a while, it seemed almost superfluous to refer to it.

She is able to invest the lyrics with a variety of emotions and was perhaps at her best with Johann Georg Jacobi's Litany for the Feast of All Souls. This is a superb song, gentle, deeply reverent, full of sympathy for souls departed. It was delivered in a quiet voice.

That voice is worth remarking on. It's noticeable that some young singers, from whom we have heard a lot in Winchester in the past few years, with festivals and competitions, feel that they have to show what big voices they've got and many Winchester venues are not really suitable for this. It can actually hurt your ears. But Dorothee Jansen gets her effects without exaggeration, though it's obvious her voice has great power as well as subtlety and shading.

The concert, in which Miss Jansen was again sensitively accompanied by Francis Grier, was in aid of Winchester Cathedral music foundation and L'Arche Community in Kerala, South India. - John Docherty