Saturday's classical concerts at the Belfast Festival were both vocal recitals. Well, not quite. Thomas Allen's evening performance was actually rather more. For nearly 90 minutes, he conducted a master class with four young singers from Northern Ireland. And then he returned after the interval for a half-hour-plus recital of his own.

As a teacher, especially for one engaged in the first-time encounters of a public master class, Allen showed himself to be fearlessly interventionist. It can't have been a comfortable experience for the young singers to find some of their failings so clearly and accurately identified for exposure and remedial work. But, of course, that's exactly what they need.

Whether dealing with the words or taking them out of the equation, working on the conflicts between natural physical inclinations and artistic imperatives, or exploring the relationship between performer and audience, that finely-focused examination was exactly what Allen offered.

And then, in his own performances of songs by Schubert, Brahms, Finzi and Britten, he showed himself fully the master of the issues he had raised.

The festival let itself down by providing neither texts nor translations of the songs in either master class or the recital. And in the morning, when both were made available for the recital by Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling, there were problems with omissions - sometimes the translations were missing, sometimes the original texts, sometimes both.

None of this seemed to trouble Tilling, who showed an outgoing, bouncy personality while she endeavoured to keep the audience adequately informed. And her singing of a selection of songs by Grieg and Stenhammar was simply ravishing, the voice so pure, so finely modulated, and governed by a musical intelligence so lively, one had the impression she could enthral her singers in just about any repertoire. That didn't prove to be the case. The darker shadows of Sibelius were less successfully suggested, and in the songs by Strauss during the second half, the soaring melodic lines never really took flight as they should. The tone, the agility, the sensuality that is such a part of Strauss's relationship to the soprano voice, were all there. But the consonants interrupted the flow, and the vocal rapture never quite accumulated as it should. But, don't get me wrong: in the right repertoire Camilla Tilling is well worth going out of your way to hear.