CAROL SMITH (soprano) began her recital in Dublin Castle on Tuesday with Mozarts grandiloquent Masonic Cantata K 619, demonstrating a voice which had the power and edge to cut through an orchestra going full blast. Happily, she chose a more intimate style for Gretchen am Spinnrade and the two other songs by Schubert which followed, but it was in the dramatic vocal lines of Berg's Sieben Fruhe Lieder that her talents found their fullest expression. The words are full of conventional quietude, but the music has the angst of German Expressionism and she made the most of this unsettling combination.

The six songs by Strauss afforded Malcolm Martineau (piano) some solo work in which he played like an angel, getting closer to the spirit of the music than the singer, who was inclined to overstress the accents, both in music and words, thereby spoiling the continuity of line.

Walton's cycle of six songs, A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table, is so elaborately decorated that it may not be humanly possible to articulate the words in a comprehensible fashion. At its first performance, we were told, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sang beautifully, but in what language it was not clear. Carol Smith got some of the words through, but not enough to elucidate the texts, except in the familiar nursery rhyme which ends the cycle.

Some less demanding song Barber's Solitary Hotel. Novello's Rough Stuff and Duke's Paris in New York - showed that the singer was very much at home in the world of the musical; she made every word tell, which was fortunate, as the music could no always stand on its own.