Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

This was an engaging programme of otherwise disparate songs linked by a common destiny – being consigned to the rarest public exposure. If that seems a premature and harsh category in which to place Anne-Marie O’Farrell’s

Hoopoe Song

, which was receiving its premiere, then consider the opening item.

Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens)

is a 30-minute cycle of songs by that most maligned of great 20th-century composers, Arnold Schoenberg. He completed them 100 years ago, in 1909, at a time when his music was just beginning its fateful break from conventional tonality. They are gripping, as well as historic, and among his finest for voice and piano, yet almost never performed here.

So all credit to mezzo-soprano Aylish Kerrigan and pianist Dearbhla Collins for unearthing them. Settings of like-mindedly unconventional verse by Stefan George, the 15 songs present an oriental garden as a backdrop to the emotional itinerary of a love affair, ultimately doomed, possibly reflecting the composer’s situation at the time. The music inhabits what Schoenberg called “suspended tonality”, and there is less depiction of content – whether garden or emotion – than of inner, expressionist responses to content.

Making the whole package absorbingly easy to “get” was pianist Collins, who delivered the Schoenberg sound-world with the most intense and persuasive concentration. While the composer preferred a high soprano for these songs – comfortable on the occasional high foray but not quite at ease in the predominantly low register – the mezzo Kerrigan offered the opposite, her tone and vowels often suffering at the upper end. That said, she gave each song with an insight and intensity that matched Collins.

The pictorial element in the songs which followed offered a welcome contrast: birds in Seóirse Bodley's 1996 Fraw Musica; the North Sea in the 1973 Tides, by Aloys Fleischmann; and a loving portrayal of the Glens of Antrim in Elaine Agnew's 2004 April Awake.

As for O'Farrell, her Hoopoe Songdeserves a better destiny than the one I've projected. The hoopoe bird lives in Jerusalem, where it flies back and forth over the walls and borders separating the antagonistic cultures resident there. As such, it provides a powerful symbolism in Seamus Cashman's poem and in O'Farrell's well-crafted and expressive setting. MICHAEL DUNGAN