Irish Times writers review Tian Ying at St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny, The National Chamber Choir/Celso Antunes at the National Gallery in Dublin and Jeffrey Lewis/Jacob Golden at Whelans in Dublin.

Last night's piano recital in St Canice's was one to rattle complacency and leave the mind buzzing. Tian Ying's playing of Chopin, on this second night of the Kilkenny Arts Festival's classical music programme, was so individual, so subversive of convention, that it startled. Yet it was so integrated that it made one think anew about well-known music.

Tian Ying is one of those musicians who can maintain focus simultaneously on the smallest detail and on the shape of the entire piece. Because of that, because he has a specific concept of each work, and because his technical prowess enables him to deliver - and with what beautiful tone! - he is an original whom one cannot dismiss, even if one disagrees with him.

The Fantasy in F Minor, Opus 49, and the Polonaise Fantasy, Opus 61, were astonishingly protean. They came across not so much as a series of impeccably contrasted sections, each of a definite style, but as an inspired burst of perpetual shape-shifting. The four Mazurkas, Opus 67, were played as a single concept, like one of the Schumann piano cycles.

Each section had an underlying instability which led towards, and often right into, the contrasting character of the next. Yet one never knew what was going to happen next.

The structure of Liszt's Piano Sonata is so self-conscious that freedom easily renders it incoherent. Yet as the composer himself said, all performance should sound as if it is an inspired improvisation. Tian Ying never lost that balance between spontaneity and calculation. He showed that transcendent virtuosity and inventiveness are not the main reasons for this sonata's reputation as one of the high points in 19th-century piano music. Above all, it is an extraordinary idea, sustained by extraordinarily disciplined imagination.

National Chamber Choir's summer series at the National Gallery ended with an impressive concert, warmly received by a large audience. It was devoted to music by Gesualdo, Stravinsky and Villa-Lobos.

Three motets from Gesualdo's Sabbato Sancto series underlined those qualities that fascinate and seduce contemporary audiences and performers. The conductor, Celso Antunes, painted a complete picture of each piece, but he was also inclined to emphasise their extraordinary moments of chromaticism, rather than let them flow from the interplay of lines. A more natural result might have been achieved if he had applied to these motets the more even, line-driven methods he used in Stravinsky's idiosyncratic completion of incomplete Gesualdo works.

Yet this concert showed just how much has been achieved in the few months since Antunes took over as the NCC's artistic director. None of its strengths were unknown to the choir in the past, but I have never heard them sustained so well.

Highlights of those omni-present qualities included the control of tone and pitch in Stravinsky's Russian-style Pater noster and in his Anthem, The dove descending; the extraordinary unanimity of words and rhythm in a fast-moving account of his Credo, and the general security shown in the extreme challenges of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas brasileiras No 9, which is better known in the composer's arrangement for strings.

This first season is proving a honeymoon for the NCC and Antunes. Developments I would hope to see include a release of the choir's fine voices from a rather lidded sound. Can they let fly, while retaining the discipline which that technique is facilitating?

Destiny seems just around the corner.

York's Jeffrey Lewis is a graduate of that city's "anti-folk" scene, the infuriatingly twee and self- celebratory movement that spawned last year's flavour-of-the-week novelty duo, The Moldy Peaches.

Unlike the Peaches, though, Lewis tacks his jokey lyrics to songs of genuine merit. His début album, The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane and Other Stories, is an off-key delight, tingling with caustic observational wit.

In concert, the fresh-faced Lewis proved to be a performer of surprising delicacy and substance . His debt to the Moldy Peaches is readily discernible, but he possessed none of their overweening smugness. On the autobiographical The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song, he mingled hilarious word association and crisp acoustic fretwork. The new single, Back When I Was 4, segued from tart improvisation to uplifting melody.

In time, Lewis may turn out to be as idiosyncratic and enduring a talent as New Zealand lo-fi pioneer Chris Knox.

The gulf between Lewis and Rough Trade label mate Jacob Golden couldn't be more pronounced. Golden is a deeply earnest, resolutely straightlaced, Sacramento-born troubadour recently located to London, where he has garnered slavering comparisons to Jeff Buckley, the Miracle Legion and even Bends-era Radiohead.

On stage, it was immediately apparent that Golden is something out of the ordinary. His voice, a honeyed, pathos-charged drawl , is perhaps the most distinctive since Buckley's and his material can proudly hold its own alongside Grace or anything by Nick Drake.

The creepingly majestic Jesus Angelina climaxed in one of those swelling choruses that turns the listener's blood to ice water. On the lilting Come On Over, he imbued a saccharine indie-pop ditty with a laconic menace at once chilling, narcotic and uplifting.

Junk your David Gray records and forget about that new Beth Orthon LP. Jacob Golden is the only singer-songwriter worth pursuing this summer.