THE first Humewood Opera Festival was not exactly blessed with good fortune. In the wake of the cancellation of Mozart's La finta semplice, the grey skies in advance, of soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez's recital last night - given in a tent erected in the Humewood Castle courtyard threatened further problems.

Happily, however, the rain held off and the messages in the festival programme book were all upbeat; La finta semplice to be given in Dublin early in the new year, plans for the 1997 festival already under way, and a new series of RHA/Humewood celebrity recitals to be given in the RHA Gallagher Gallery on Sundays throughout the winter and spring.

The Humewood tent looked to be around 100ft by 30ft and the organisers chose to place Fernandez and her pianist, David Harper, midway along one of the long sides. With a fabric draped, interior the major acoustic limitations were quite predictable and it is fully to the organisers credit that they eschewed any form of amplification. An electronically unadorned performance is greatly to be preferred to an interventionist third party's view of how things should sound.

That said, the limitations were on this occasion made clear to virtually everyone in the audience as the singer courteously chose to rotate through 180 degrees so that listeners at either end of the tent could each in turn have an opportunity of hearing her performance front on. The difference in volume and clarity between the two extremes was quite remarkable.

Remarkable, too, was the uneventfulness of the hour long musical programme, much of it material of a light, dispensable nature. Fernandez, whose not always well centred intonation could be put down to, the acoustic problems, didn't really get into her stride until the middle of the second half, with some intimately spun Copland which wooed one male member of the audience into spontaneous banter.

From there on, personality and presence won the day, even when the vocal risk taking was scoring negatively. One could only wonder how much better the singer and her delicate fingered pianist would have fared in a musically supportive venue.