Michael Dervan at the Boyle Arts Festival.

Tenor Robin Tritschler offered an unusual programme at Boyle Arts Festival. Each half opened with a substantial work, Schumann's Dichterliebe, exploring the pain of lost love in the first, Michael Tippett's Boyhood's End, a reflection on youth from an old man's perspective, setting words from WH Hudson's autobiography, in the second.

Each half moved on to a themed group - "Women and Children First" in the first half, "Men alone to war" in the second - and ended on a decidedly light note, Rossini's Chanson du Bébé before the interval, a Noël Coward medley at the end.

Sadly, Tritschler didn't manage on this occasion to maintain the high standards he set in performances I heard from him earlier this year.

The sound, of course, was still clear and fine. But neither the Schumann cycle nor the Tippett cantata found their mark. The singing was altogether too generalised, and Tritschler's task can't have been made an easier by the too prominent and not always well-aligned piano playing of Dearbhla Collins.

Most of the lighter music went better. The Poulencian side of Honegger was revealed in the brief Giraudoux settings of the Petit Cours de morale, and the Deux Lettres d'Enfants by the little-known Jacques de Menasce (1905-60) amusingly sets thank-you notes from the children of a colleague.

The Coward medley found Tritschler falling into the trap which catches most recitalists in this kind of repertoire, that of sounding artfully correct in songs that need a different kind of finish.

He was altogether happier in the darker war group by Butterworth, Bernadette Marmion, Bridge and Weill.

But at no point did he come close to the expressive command of the best work I have heard from him.