Kiri Te Kanawa Luttrellstown Castle John Allen of the problems encountered at these outdoor events is the phenomenon of a mute show being enacted by performers on a platform on the right while the sound emanates from speakers on the left.

Another is the proximity of drinking and smoking attendees. Having come to terms with the acoustics, if not the carousing, there was much to enjoy in Kiri Te Kanawa's concert in the gardens of Luttrellstown Castle on Saturday.

The veteran soprano was in fresh voice, her trademark creamy tone still intact and used to good effect throughout. After her opening set, a light-as-thistledown rendering of three of Canteloube's Auvergne song arrangements, she took a brief look back at her now discarded opera career.

Assured performances of arias from Puccini's La villi and Catalani's La Wally were followed by a ravishing one of Louise's hymn to sexual freedom from Charpentier's opera. At the end of the evening she threw in a delicious "O mi babbino caro" and a lyrically-poised "Danny boy".

But the dignified composure that enhanced her "serious" offerings served her less well in the mix of show songs and pop ballads that followed. Although her hugely-amplified voice rode the bombastic orchestrations effortlessly, there was a certain aloofness in her approach to numbers that I have heard given with considerably greater impact by lesser artists. The quality of vocal delivery didn't deteriorate but, apart from her poignant way with Novello's "If only he'd looked my way", there was little sense of anything in this section coming from the singer's heart.

In between the vocal items, Robin Stapleton jollied the NSO along in a selection of folk arrangements and theatre and film music. He paced the opening Prince Igor overture well, but the amplified sound was decidedly unflattering to the string and wind sections of the orchestra.

Miss Canary Island 1936

Focus Theatre

Susan Conley

second production in the Focus Theatre's annual one-act play season is, like its predecessor, Dead Boys, an afterlife play, in this case not so much about "what is going to happen" as "what happens". The bad news is, if you're a struggling, aspiring novelist, things don't get any better, and it really might take an eternity to finish that first draft.

Manny (Lenny Hayden), the ill-fated novelist, is buried parallel to someone he would have sighted across opposing lines in the Spanish Civil War, and Largo (Shane Nestor) isn't one to let him forget it. Largo rarely misses an opportunity to goad his Blueshirt cemetery-mate, and his own status as a well-remembered hero allows him a certain degree of seniority in the pecking order of the dead. The competitive relationship between the men is well executed and the play is full of humorous ripostes and intriguing ideas, but there is too much that begs explanation.

Playwright Conall Quinn lays out concept upon concept, but in many cases doesn't follow through with sufficient information. He has created a world of pure speculation and imagination, but such a world needs more exposition than the usual sort. For example, Largo and Manny seem well able to interact with the living, an extraordinary proposition and one that is never properly explained. Most puzzling of all, they are able to kill each other all over again, without the sense that it was truly the end of it all or a mere limbo they were inhabiting. Conflicting ideologies, in art as well as politics, need more development than Quinn has allowed. His two lead actors, however, serve his script well, and Lenny Hayden and Shane Nestor make a good showing for themselves, with Nestor's dead-pan Largo a real treat.

Runs at lunchtimes until July 20th and then in the evenings with Dead Boys from July 22nd until August 3rd.

Temple Bar Music Centre

Peter Crawley

call Mongolian throat-singing an "acquired taste" might not immediately appear offensive. The Temenos Project's misguided exercise in orientalism, however, uprooted the ancient art of khöömii from its shamanistic origins and delivered it out of context, while expensive workshops allowed cultural thrill-seekers to learn an exotic party trick.

In our post-modern age, liberal cosmopolitans hunt for authenticity while nagged by post-colonial concerns. One could sum it up in the phrase "Mongolian throat-singing is so . . . real". Such awe-filled cultural appropriation has become positively de rigueur via the "world music" ghetto. Here, morsels from the orient provide spiritual soundtracks to faddish western love-ins such as Zen for beginners, office-desk Feng Shui or the Tao of dating.

London couple Michael Ormiston and Candida Valentino putatively granted us an audience with Tserendava, a Mongolian "split-singer, herder and lorry-driver". Despite some attempts to put Tserendava'a Altai praise songs in context, the witless westerners chose to dominate the performance. Their middle-class tones, garish hippie attire and fleeting demonstrations of eastern musical "curios" made the evening feel like a 1970s Blue Peter repeat.

Reaching a mortifying nadir, Ormiston and Valentino literally chased each other around the stage, bonging separate gongs. A late Mongolian standard segued through Amazing Grace and finally into a sing-along version of Molly Malone, over which Tserendava, Ormiston and Valentino demonstrated the surprisingly mundane feat of delivering one deep vocal drone while simultaneously emitting a seemingly unregulated whistling overtone. "That's not whistling," corrected our sporadically meditating compère, "it's someone understanding something that's universal."

For his part, the silent, dignified and frequently absent Tserendava seemed to acknowledge such horrid cultural tourism when, during a hunting dance, he pretended to shoot arrows into the audience.