Dublin

THIS WAS meant to have been a gala concert debut with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra for Sarah-Jane Brandon, the South African soprano who won the 2009 Kathleen Ferrier Competition and took second prize at the Veronica Dunne Competition last year in Dublin.

Owing to illness, however, her place was taken at what seemed short notice by Irish soprano Sylvia O'Brien, who exceeded requirements by tackling all four scheduled solos: Mozart's E Susanna non vien . . . Dove sono(from The Marriage of Figaro) and Exsultate jubilate, Dvorák's Song to the Moon(from Rusalka) and Massenet's Mirror Scenefrom Thaïs.

The purely orchestral components mostly took their cue from these selections, with guest conductor Matthew Wood securing trim accounts of the Marriage of FigaroOverture and two Slavonic Dances from Dvorák's Op 46set (of which No 1 was without warning replaced by No 2).

Alan Smale, leader of the RTÉ NSO, was the uncredited soloist in Méditation, the ravishing instrumental interlude from Thaïs that probably out-fames any of the opera's vocal numbers. The audience was clearly ready to melt, yet neither Wood nor Smale seemed bent on releasing the music in all its perfumed fullness.

The Capriccio Italienby Tchaikovsky, although it got faster and louder in all the right places, did so without generating much real tension; it was chiefly in the Polonaiseand Waltzfrom the same composer's Eugene Oneginthat Wood's interpretive ideas were at their freshest.

What should have been Brandon’s evening thus solidly turned out to be O’Brien’s. Her voice has undergone quite a ripening in recent years, putting a keen edge on her characteristic determination to deliver the goods.

The top-note culminations may have been ever so slightly guarded, but they were bull’s-eyes.