The music at the heart of Sunday's recital at St Michael's, Dun Laoghaire was, unusually, by Brahms, a composer whose name rarely features in organ recitals, in spite of the high value placed on his small output for the instrument. The chorale preludes, Op. 122, were his last work, written during his final illness, when he was also bereft after the death of Clara Schumann. The music is of a concentration and privacy - and also of a contrapuntal intricacy - and doesn't readily yield up its secrets in public performance.

It was an uncompromisingly brave gesture on the part of Colm Carey to offer all 11 preludes as a set and if it didn't fully come off, that had more to do with the music than the performer. The highlight on this occasion was the penultimate prelude of the set, Herzlich tut mich verlangen (My heart is filled with longing), with its quiet, often cross-patterned, gently aching relentlessness.

The symmetrically-conceived programme offered vocal items on either side of the Brahms, Carys Lane's familiar beauty of voice well in the rarity of some post-Hindemithian Anton Heiller and more familiar Bach. There was, however, occasionally, a strangely jarring quality, as if at times the often fast vibrato somehow impeded clarity of articulation and security of pitch.

The haunting tread of Buxtehude's D minor Passacaglia, showing the composer at his greatest and most characteristic (and which greatly fired the enthusiasm of Brahms), and the extended, exuberant rush of Bach's Fantasia on Komm, Heiliger Geist, BWV651, were both accommodated with stylish ease by Colm Carey, now well established as the outstanding Irish organist of the younger generation.