Graham Joseph, Nicole Panizza

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

Purcell/Britten – Evening Hymn. Sweeter than roses. Handel – Stille amare. Mozart – Ombra felice K 255. Brahms – Four Serious Songs Op 121. Jake Heggie – Encountertenor.

One of the central achievements of the early music revival has been in the realm of voice production commonly known as falsetto. There are now male contraltos and sopranos capable of the extreme clarity and agility attributed to those long-extinct rulers of the operatic stage, the castrati.

Apart from growing opportunities in contemporary music, the new falsettists or countertenors are still by and large restricted to pre-classical repertoire. This solo recital by Irish countertenor Graham Joseph was therefore highly distinctive in that it offered a balanced survey of music from the 17th to the 20th centuries.

A further novelty was that the piano, played by Nicole Panizza, was in most cases the correct accompanying instrument – provided, that is, one recognises the validity of Britten's idiosyncratic and thoroughly pianistic realisations of Purcell's songs.

Two 18th-century items, originally composed for contralto castrasti, were the titular hero's aria Stille amare from Handel's opera Tolomeo and Mozart's stand-alone operatic scene Ombra felice . . . Io ti lascio.

The 19th century might easily have proved the missing link in a programme of this kind, had it not been filled with Brahms's Four Serious Songs – conceived for bass voice but now time-honoured in the female contralto canon.

US composer Jake Heggie represented the contemporary scene with the camp and self-reflexive Encountertenor(1995) – a short song cycle to words by John Hall on the trials and tribulations of today's high male vocalists ("Pitch can be a bitch / But so can I").

Sadly, although Panizza's accompaniments kept things on track, Joseph seemed to be having a bad day. Some choppy vocal phrasing, eccentric timing and acute mistuning meant that this thoroughly enterprising recital just didn't go as it might have done.