Lynne Dawson's biography opens with a quote from Gramophone magazine describing her as "perhaps the leading Handel opera soprano today". So, for her to drop the group of Handel arias from her Dublin debut recital at the Gaiety Theatre on Sunday was a serious disappointment.

No explanation was offered, but there were recurrent markers during the evening - notes which cracked, and difficulties controlling tone - which suggested that Dawson was perhaps not entirely at her best. That said, there was a lot to enjoy in her programme of Schubert, Duparc (a replacement for the Handel), Poulenc, Mozart, Puccini, Britten and Stanford.

Hers is the sort of voice that we in Ireland seem to produce or celebrate all too rarely. Her tone and vibrato are both light (she is very active in the area of early music) yet she has a fully functional overdrive. And she understands that relaxation of manner is a better strategy for reaching an audience over the full length of a recital than highly-stressed insistence.

What stood out for me in an evening of musicianly singing were the dramatic truth and psychological depth of the arias she chose from Mozart's Don Giovanni ("Mi tradi") and Le nozze di Figaro ("Dove sono"). Here the full range of her art was revealed, and neither power nor delicacy of expression were allowed to mask - as they often do - a real appreciation of Mozart's musical style. In Mozart, as throughout, Jimmy Vaughan was an alertly sensitive accompanist.