The overall winners of the RTE Millennium Musician of the Future Competition 2000 were Ailish Tynan and Peter Tuite. They shared Monday's recital at the RDS, but the programme fell into totally independent halves; Ailish Tynan sang a mixed bag of songs and arias ranging from Handel to Britten, by way of Balfe, whereas Peter Tuite played one work only, Brahms's colossal Piano Sonata in F minor, Op 5.

Ailish Tynan opened with Mozart's Exultate Jubilate but did not succeed in making it sound rejoicing or spontaneous, surely essential in this piece. With the two songs by Schubert, Du bist die Ruh and Die junge Nonne, and the two by Duparc, Chanson triste and L'invitation au voyage, she not only showed what a beautiful instrument her voice is, able to float high notes without any coarseness of tone, but also offered an insight into the emotional atmosphere of the poems.

The attempts of Britten and Auden to write cabaret songs are neither good songs nor good cabaret, but they do need a natural cabaret singer, one who can move without effort from song to speech and preserve a clear articulation in both genres. More suited to the talents of the singer were Balfe's dulcet "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls" and the operatic arias by Mozart, Puccini, Donizetti and Handel, in which she produced a graceful legato line. She was sympathetically supported by Deborah Kelleher at the piano.

The same piano took on a changed character under the hands of Peter Tuite. It thundered, it whispered, it cooed, it was stentorian, caressing - there seemed no end to its many voices. Like an orchestra it had many colours, strings, woodwind, brass and their combinations. As the Brahms Sonata is a long one, such a variety of tone colour helps to make the piece's progress dramatically exciting, but even more impressive was the way the pianist conveyed his sense of the profundity underlying the music.