Judith Mok (voice)/ Derabhla Collins (piano)

Sequenza III (for voice) - Luciano Berio

Songs (for voice and piano) - Rhona Clarke

After a Childhood (for voice and piano) - Fergus Johnston

Three Old Inscriptions Op 25 (for voice and piano - Gyorgy Kurtag

Stripsody (for voice) - Berberian

Berio's Sequenza II (1966) makes one realise to what a narrow range of sounds and techniques a singer is normally restricted. It is as if the composer had discovered an encyclopaedia of vocal sounds which happened to include singing and had made a very personal selection, kaleidoscopic in its unpredictability. Judith Mok was singer, actor, mimic, cabaret artist and, so it seemed, a person afflicted with a disabling cough; all of which parts she performed with astounding skill.

After such a tour de force, Rhona Clarke's setting of Yeats's The old men admiring themselves in the water, perfectly mirroring, All that's beautiful drifts away, was like a trip back into the Celtic Twilight. Her setting of Autobiography, by Louis MacNeice, never quite matched the ominousness of lines like: "When I was five the black dreams came . . . "

Fergus Johnstons' setting for After a childhood away from Ireland, by Eavan Boland, is a more ambitious work. It comes to a sort of climax halfway with the line "love is also memory", but after that music and text diverge and the music seems impatient of the text, almost ready to disown it.

Kurtag's Three Old Inscriptions (1986) were so effective in their simplicity and straightforwardness that they made the other works seem unnecessarily ostentatious. The pared-down piano accompaniment presented an unusual challenge to Dearbhla Collins; she met it with the requisite delicacy of nuance.

Sunday's concert concluded with Berberian's Stripsody (1966). She used the same technique as Berio, but to a deliberately comic end. Fragments of farmyard hubbub and domestic turmoil, mixed with bits of pop culture and dialogue, made an amusing sound picture, but the total effect was that of a parody rather than an independent work.