Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin at Lincoln Center "Have you seen but a bright lily grow," a Ben Jonson poem asks, "before rude hands had touch'd it?" The poem tries, through question after question, to find parallels for the purity of the speaker's beloved: When the composer Robert Johnson set these words to music in 1616, the charm was doubled. The text described someone beautiful, and it could be performed with that same spotless beauty. Sung by the countertenor Andreas Scholl on Saturday evening at Alice Tully Hall, "Have You Seen the Bright Lily Grow?" became a kind of vocal autobiography. "O so white, O so soft, O so sweet," he sang, with sweet, soft whiteness. Mr. Scholl's voice is as pure as Jonson's bright lily but also mellow and soft-grained, like the full moon seen through thin clouds. It is a slender instrument that last year was occasionally inaudible in the 4,000-seat Metropolitan Opera when he sang in Handel's "Rodelinda." On Saturday even the 1,100-seat Tully Hall seemed as large as Mr. Scholl - suffering, he said from the stage, from a mild cold - could comfortably manage. Joined by his wife, the pianist Tamar Halperin, in a program divided between English songs and German lieder, Mr. Scholl sang with calm assurance. Including familiar melodies by Dowland, Campion and Purcell alongside three of Haydn's lesser-known "English Canzonettas" before moving on to songs by Mozart, Schubert and Brahms, Mr. Scholl was responsive to the words and sensitive in his phrasing. "With you, with you is no desiring," goes the traditional text that Brahms set in "All Mein Gedanken," and in a slight pause between the repetitions of "bei dir" Mr. Scholl poured a world of longing. In Schubert's "Hymn to the Virgin" - the famous "Ave Maria" - Mr. Scholl and Ms. Halperin chose a flowing tempo, never simply wallowing in sound. Mr. Scholl can nevertheless give the impression of floating pleasantly above the music rather than inhabiting it. On Saturday the moods of the songs in each group, sung one after another without pause, were often hard to tell apart. Though he can be radiant in early music, Mr. Scholl's temperament is not a Romantic one, so his lieder often came across as merely polite. An artist of classy control and gentle tone rather than intensity, Mr. Scholl described himself perfectly when he sang the opening lines of a Friedrich Rückert poem set by Schubert: "You are peace, the mild peace."