A track from one of Sir Thomas Allen’s CDs was broadcast at breakfast time recently. It featured a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song — delivered at high speed in a broad Geordie accent. This provided two salutary reminders: first that Sir Thomas delights in singing humorous as well as serious music, and second that he isn’t Welsh, as I’d always mistakenly assumed.

“My homeland is between the Tees and the Tweed,” Sir Thomas confirmed as he introduced a group of traditional Northumberland songs at his Oxford Lieder Festival recital. The songs strongly evoked the contrasting history of the area — mining on the one hand, farming on the other.

Sir Thomas’s sense of humour had already emerged in Ravel’s Histoires Naturelles, settings of animal poems by Jules Renard. In Le Paon, a peacock has been stood up at the altar: “Love burnishes the brilliance of his colours, and his crest quivers like a lyre,” sang Sir Thomas. He then left a perfectly timed pause before continuing: “His bride does not appear.” Expertly judged, too, was the interweaving of wistfulness and delivery of burial requests in Poulenc’s Poèmes de Ronsard: “I wish rather that a tree might shade me instead of marble.”

Sir Thomas has been patron of the Oxford Lieder Festival since it began. In this, the festival’s tenth birthday year, its Patron chose an appropriately major work to crown his recital: Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Op 48. Sir Thomas’s performance of this raw and direct depiction of young love was exactly tailored to the intimate Holywell ambience, with every note and gesture considered and made to count. Maybe not every note in his voice is quite as sure as it once was, but what does that matter when such considered thought, experience, and artistry is at work? Prizewinning young accompanist Joseph Middleton provided excellent, unshowy support throughout.