Erraught, Krügel

NCH, Dublin

Tara Erraught has come a long way since she first leapt to international attention by taking the second prize in the 2007 Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition.

The Dundalk mezzo soprano, who gave this year's Rising Star recital at the National Concert Hall this week, is currently based in Munich, where she's a member of the opera studio of the Bavarian State Opera. She's appeared in company productions of Jenufa, L'elisir d'amore, and Madama Butterfly, and she makes her Glyndebourne Festival début in July as the Sandman in Hansel and Gretel.

She's been widely featured in RTÉ concerts (RTÉ had spotted her even before her competition success), and she sang in Opera Ireland's concert performance and recording of Balfe's Falstaff, as part of the Balfe bicentenary celebrations of 2008. But she has yet to appear in an actual production by an Irish opera company. This concert suggested that Ireland's operatic life is the poorer for her absence. Erraught is one of those singers who takes a real delight in negotiating the obstacle courses of virtuosic arias. She sounded fully at home in the brilliant greeting of Nobles seigneurs, salut!,from Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots,and delighted in fluttering balletically between the extremes of her range in Cinderella's Non più mestafrom Rossini's La Cenerentola. The soprano-like brightness she's developed at the top of her range is surely going to increase her options for the future.

The evening's songs were less well chosen, and pianist Nicolai Krügel, whose responses were so apt in the operatic numbers, made Erraught's task more difficult with exaggerated effects in a group of Haydn's English canzonets, and fussy detailing in Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

He was in altogether better form in a group of French songs by Chausson, but Erraught was here more forthright than suggestive.

She did, however, give a sense of full mastery of the evening's newest work, Cork composer Solfa Carlile's Sounds, the winner of this year's Jerome Hynes Composers' Competition, a witty response to the playful ideas – "Mice scuffed up and down Mozart's back"– of Brendan Kennelly's poem.