It's taken some time, but it looks as if Paddy Casey is finally getting together his life as a musician and songwriter.

Paddy Casey

The Village, Dublin

Tony Clayton-Lea

He released Amen (So Be It), his excellent debut album, four years ago to critical acclaim and public adulation, cruised to a degree on his mercurial, occasionally beautiful tunes and then, by all accounts, misplaced this significant momentum in a series of lost weekends.

In the interim, inferior singer- songwriters such as David Kitt and Damien Rice raised their heads above the parapet. Result? A new breed of troubled troubadour has taken over the country, and Casey is nowhere to be seen. Until now.

This gig was the official launch of his new album, so the happy-clappy audience can, by and large, be summarily dismissed as those rent-a-crowd types who would turn up at the opening of a dustbin lid. Yet despite the isn't-he-a-great-man-altogether atmosphere, Casey delivered a set that proved his debut and some superb late-1990s gigs were not fondly remembered mistakes of the era.

Selections from Amen (So Be It) were interspersed with songs from his just-released second CD, Living, and although Casey may have tried to bump up the selection from the latter with the muscularity of a no more than proficient band, it was fairly obvious that when it was just him, his guitar and one of his songs, simplicity overrode all else.

There was much to celebrate here: one of Ireland's best new singer- songwriters has rediscovered the plot. There's work to be done, lost ground and time to be reclaimed. Get to it.

Leonard, RTÉ NSO/Houlihan

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Le Corsaire Overture, Romeo And Juliet love scene - Berlioz. Violin Concerto No 1 - Bruch. Symphony No 2 - Prokofiev

Prokofiev worried about his Second Symphony, both during its composition and after its premiere. Feeling a need to impress the sophisticated audiences of Paris in the mid-1920s, he embarked on a modernist symphony of "iron and steel". In the event everyone - the public, the critics and even the composer himself - seems to have been nonplussed. Prokofiev was even prompted to worry about becoming second-rate, although he still had the heart to hope the work would eventually be thought graceful.

But grace is not an easy quality to associate with a work that seems so consistently set on blowing raspberries. The statement of the second movement's theme offers a briefly ingratiating interlude, but most of the variations that follow return to discordant exploration.

The density and relentlessness of much of the music challenge both players and listeners, and the RTÉ NSO's performance under Robert Houlihan had exactly the right sort of focus and commitment to bring off Prokofiev's strange creation, which is both naive and daring enough to have retained its shock value into the 21st century.

Some of the austerity of the Prokofiev seemed to have seeped inappropriately into the delivery of the two pieces by Berlioz that opened the concert. But the performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto in G minor more than made amends. Catherine Leonard made its sweetly songful moments fully her own, mixing inwardness and unforced extroversion with a persuasive and personal touch. Houlihan and his players entered fully into the spirit of this most effective of concertos.

Travis

Ulster Hall, Belfast

Paul McNamee

Fran Healy may have been out of the saddle for a time, but he still knows how to work a crowd. "Most of my ancestors are from Belfast," Travis's front man announces. "It's always special to be back where your blood is from." Belfast swoons and hollers.

This is a double celebration for Travis. Primarily it's to mark the release of 12 Memories, their new album. But it's also a celebration of survival. Travis shouldn't be here. Last spring Neil Primrose, their drummer, almost died in a swimming accident. The time-out made the band take a hard look at themselves. And they didn't like what they found.

Tonight they try to unveil a new Travis, a band with drive and lead in their pencils. It doesn't always work, but they're knocking close.

September 11th and the Iraq war have had fundamental influences on Healy. Gone are the songs about flowers in windows, in come considerations of mortality. The anti-war anthem The Beautiful Occupation has more steel than anything else Travis have written. Quicksand is naked and honest, but live they are no classics. They feel like Travis trying just a little too hard.

It's the old songs that still swing it. It's also an old song that proves the most telling. When they launch into The Fear, a track about the darkness rising, they sound as if they've lived with it, not simply written a song about it. If Travis want to regain ground and be something more than singalong kings, they need more of the same.