Edel O'Brien's wonderful recital lifted what had been a so-so day at the Boyle Arts festival, writes Michael Dervan.

The title of Monday's lunchtime lecture/recital at Boyle Arts Festival was very tempting - "Charles Ives and the Spirit of Transcendentalist New England". The reality of the event, however, left a lot to be desired.

Part of the problem was that it was a lecture/recital by a duo, violinist Sharan Leventhal and pianist Lois Shapiro, who didn't seem to have the exact nature of their collaboration clearly worked out. They flitted from comment to comment and from reading to reading, often without registering clearly the points they were attempting to make, like a pair of bees bedazzled by a display of floral colour and neglecting to set about the collection of nectar.

They fired questions at each other about what to do and deal with next and bubbled over with enthusiasm for particular passages in the music.

But they were so vague about some of the basics that when the audience got the opportunity to ask questions someone had to enquire when Ives wrote one of the pieces under discussion (an answer was not immediately to hand) and even if he was still alive. Sure, there had been very general pointers about dates, but this often vague and poorly structured event was very much on the lines of "some of the things we know about Charles Ives, and not in any particular order".

Leventhal's dry, inexpressive tone was disappointing in the performances of two of Ives's four Violin Sonatas (the Second and Fourth). Shapiro's piano playing had, by contrast, a real expressive warmth and a greater sense of intellectual grasp.

Mezzo soprano Edel O'Brien's evening recital boasted a long and demanding programme, from which she removed a group of songs by Samuel Barber to make it more manageable.

O'Brien, who's been studying and winning awards in Paris, is a musically intelligent, thoughtful singer who takes her responsibilities as an actress very seriously, too.

In everything she does you can sense a clarity of purpose, and the demands she makes of her voice are not those likely to excite canary fanciers in search of a quick thrill, but rather ones which which stem from a clear-headed response to musical moment and dramatic situation.

She sang in Italian (Verdi, Rossini, Mozart), German (Richard Strauss), English (Thomas Moore arranged by Britten), Irish (an unaccompanied Úna Bhán, and French (Ravel, Poulenc, Bizet, Gounod and Offenbach), and treated everything she sang with the same patient concern for detail.

It was hard to judge the size of her voice in the confines of King House. But she had no difficulty in filling this small venue with sound, even in the face of some competitive accompanying by Mairéad Hurley. The voice has a plaintive quality, the vibrato rather fast and tremulous - the pitch is at all times clear - and the upper range more strongly developed than the lower end.

In Boyle it was the French repertoire which stood out, as if her time in Paris has cemented a special relationship with the French language. And it was in Nuit resplendissante from Gounod's largely-forgotten Cinq-Mars that she hit the jackpot. The pliability of phrasing, the nuancing of the melody, allowed her to fill the deceptively simple lines with a suggestive depth that was quite simply heart-stopping.