Michael Dervan reviews Hampson, Rieger at the National Concert Hall in Dublin.

American baritone Thomas Hampson is one of those singers who lays it all on the line. He is no practitioner of the art that hides art. The workings of his musical intelligence and vocal control are as obvious as the unusual care and imagination with which he plans his programmes. And he's as attentive to and as scrupulous about the lighter end of his repertoire as he is of the heavy-duty work.

This programme was given without fee for the Order of Malta Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem, serving a Palestinian population burdened with an unemployment rate of 75 per cent, according to the Order of Malta.

In a brief speech about the cause he was supporting, Hampson ruefully pointed out that in his own country in the 1950s, he would have been prevented from sitting in a bus beside some of the composers whose music he was singing, because of the colour of their skin.

The first half of the recital was given over to songs by Liszt and Mahler, which the singer and his pianist, Wolfram Rieger, a musical partner in the fullest sense of the word, presented in performances of artful drama and intricate colouring.

It's an approach which goes as far in the direction of modernising the music as good taste and an appreciation of appropriate musical style allow. And it leaves the listener almost in a state of wonderment at the presages of the musical future that the composers lodged in their work.

The evening's second half was devoted to eight songs and arrangements by American composers, from figures familiar (Copland and Ives) and obscure (Still and Farwell), in styles folksy and arty, and in presentations that ranged from simplicity to considerable artifice.

Hampson's tone is just a little thinner and harder than at his NCH debut 10 years ago. But the artistry is, if anything, even more refined. And in pianist Wolfram Rieger he has found an accomplice who works to produce a tasteful musical equivalent of the morphings and perspective shifts of digital special effects in 21st-century movies.

By the end of the evening the duo had their listeners fully in the palm of their hands.