Coventry-born bass baritone Philip O'Reilly has been based in Ireland for the last few years. He has proved a useful contributor to Irish musical life, featuring widely in oratorio and also in opera. Appearances as a recitalist have been rarer, and I heard him in this capacity for the first time last night when the Royal Dublin Society chose to ignore issues of nationality by having him open its "Irish Artists' Forum Series".

His voice has never sounded lovelier than it did at this recital, showing in the lower register an easy fullness of tone that I cannot recall having heard in larger venues.

O'Reilly sang from the music and such was his reliance on it - head swivelling between the stand and the audience on his extreme left and right - that one could not but recall the old saying about conductors, that they should have the music in their head and not their head in the music.

In most of the Schubert and Mahler of the first half, O'Reilly's manner defaulted to a delivery that was grave and imperious, with little meaningful light or shade and not much suggestion of the meaning of the words. The animal imitations of Mahler's Lob des hohen Verstands proved the major deviation from the prevailing heaviness. The accompaniments of Graham Barber were uningratiatingly coarse.

Paradoxically it was the more limited compositional voice of Gerald Finzi, in the generally wilting Hardy settings of his Earth And Air And Rain, which seemed to energise the singer and his pianist to moments of sharper responsiveness. Sadly, it was downhill after that, with a major false start and a mid-item halt when the singer completely lost his place due to reflected light on his music.