At her debut recital in the National Concert Hall on Wednesday Franzita Whelan sang Lieder, melodies, songs both folk and art, and operatic arias. The folksongs included two of Beethoven's settings of Irish tunes (in arrangements by Gerald Moore): the accompaniments, played with a bright clarity by Andrew West, were a delight, but the singer took too heavily operatic an approach and the styles did not mix. However, in her selection of Irish folk-songs (so-called): The Last Rose of Summer; Galway Bay; The Stuttering Lovers; and the song popularised by Delia Murphy, The Spinning Wheel - all songs with the blandest of accompaniments - she came into her own and communicated them with a sweet tone and a rare sincerity.

Three arias by Puccini - Mi chiamano Mimi; O mio babbino caro; Vissi d'arte - were sung with the same understanding and dramatic force; these arias were a field in which her talents bloomed as under a benign sun. Although the ability to sing opera includes the ability to sing Lieder, it is not everybody who can move easily from opera to art-song - from the art of overstatement to the art of understatement - and Franzita Whelan's Puccini voice had difficulty in adapting itself to Schubert's settings of Goethe's introspective poetry.

After the four Goethe settings, three songs by Richard Strauss were better suited to the singer's personality and in Ruhe, meine Seele, which moves from storm to calm and back again in a few bars, she and the accompanist got to the heart of the matter.

Philip Martin's Stevie Smith Songs were more grandiloquent than ironic and rather lost their point, but the seven songs from Poulenc's La courte paille were performed with a mixture of elegance and sobriety that made the humorous surrealism of the texts and the wit of the music blend perfectly. Singer and accompanist were equal partners in this cycle and made understatement as important as overstatement.