Part recital, part spirit-channeling

Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes are not an odd-looking couple. They are fairly close in age. The British tenor is 41, the Norwegian pianist 36. Both are stylish and sport similar boyish haircuts.

They are known for their intellectual curiosity. Bostridge, who studied history and philosophy at Oxford, has a doctorate, and his dissertation has been published (more about that in a moment).

In addition, the performers -- who have made a number of superb Schubert discs together and who gave a joint recital Wednesday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of an Andsnes residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- seem to match up musically as self-effacing interpreters. But an odd couple they are.

Bostridge’s dissertation, as is well known by those who follow the careers of singers, was on the significance of witchcraft in England between 1650 and 1750. Too much can be, and has been, made of it in connection with the peculiar out-of-body effect his singing can produce. Still, how else to explain this remarkable recital than as a case of sorcery?

The evening began conventionally enough with a splendid performance of Beethoven’s one song cycle, “An die Ferne Geliebte” (To the Distant Beloved). Not known for his songs, Beethoven certainly could write them (there are at least three CDs’ worth), and, though short, this set of six with texts by a young Czech medical student, Alois Jeitteles, is a model for expressing the lovelorn despair typically found in the Romantic period song cycles, with their tight, telling melodic packets.

Bostridge, whose voice is not quite as ethereal as it once was, can gauge the proper weight of every note, every word, every line of a lyric with masterful balance.

His singing was refined and formal, yet his emotions were as though unfiltered, giving us Beethoven refined and in the rough at the same time, the Beethoven of everyday flesh and blood and not-everyday genius. Andsnes, on the other hand, remained cool no matter what.

Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31, Opus 110, his next to last piano sonata and one of his late visionary pieces, followed. Andsnes played with a level head music that is not levelheaded. Beethoven’s lyrical lines reach for the stars and drift off into numinous trills. The painful somberness of the slow movement goes beyond the lost love of his song cycle and suffers for all mankind.

The closing fugue is a hymn to something intangible, with its twists and turns turning mystical. Lingering over nothing, Andsnes simply let Beethoven speak for himself.

The recital’s second half was devoted to Schubert, mainly obscure and unimportant Schubert that could hardly compete with Beethoven’s best. But Bostridge and Andsnes had something else on their minds. With gloomy songs to texts by Goethe (“Harfenspieler”) and the composer’s friend Franz von Schober (“Viola”), Bostridge began practicing the darker arts.

No performer in music or theater has a more difficult task than to dramatize convincingly such dated, death-haunted, bitter poetry. Bostridge, who is tall, thin and thankfully wore a hip, modern dark suit with a white shirt and no tie instead of super-square tails, entered so much into the spirit of these works that he seemed possessed by them.

When Goethe’s harping on pain reached its epitome, the tenor all but shed his material self and seemed not just the spiritual embodiment of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” but the actual painting come to life.

But then came the real weirdness, with a group of six Schubert fragments, songs and short pieces for piano that the composer never finished. Bostridge startlingly broke off each unfinished song by stopping unexpectedly and staring off into space.

Andsnes would pick up with something jaunty or sweet, but he too could get only so far without being cut off midphrase, if without the same unsettling sense of drama.

Finally, Bostridge sang three encores, dismal songs by Schumann and Brahms to texts by Heinrich Heine. Each was bleaker than the last. A couple go out on the water and all they find is hopelessness, was how the tenor described one.

In these songs, Bostridge seemed less and less in possession of his senses and more and more a channel for suffering. He’s learned well from the witches. He is a great singer.