IT would be easy to conclude that Kilkenny Arts Week views its lunchtime concerts as a low budget adjunct to the larger musical offerings of the evening events.

There is, for instance, the fact that the lunchtime concerts are by and large the province of young performers, unlike, say, the various series the BBC broadcasts on Radio 3, where the good and the great are happy to conform to the particular constraints of lunch time programming.

And there's the strange way that the printed programmes segregate details of the lunchtime events and place them all after the evening ones rather than running in straightforward chronological order through the week.

Be all that as it may, yesterday, for the second day in succession, it was the music making at lunchtime which effectively eclipsed the evening's offering. The young Dublin pianist Conor Linehan, now 24 and London based, offered a programme of Mozart (the Sonata in A, K331). Ravel (the Sonatine), and Scriabin (the Fourth Sonata).

His manner was one of thoughtful understatement, yet he managed to evince a clarity of purpose which ensured that the effect was by and large refreshing. Mozart, in any case, benefits when performers take care not to make one aware of everything that's in their technical armoury, but the first two movements of the Ravel showed also a fine ear for harmonic shaping.

The finale of the Ravel and the second movement of the Scriabin called for an altogether sharper delineation than was on offer, but the abiding impression of the recital was of a player who is successfully going against the flow of demonstrativeness that takes hold of so many young performers.

The evening concert was given by the RTE Concert Orchestra under Christopher Bell. It was a middling sort of event middlebrow repertoire (the only possible exception being Kodaly's Marrnszek Dances), played with no real sharpness or focus (the "surprise" movement of Haydn's Surprise Symphony came closest to being an exception), the outcome of too little rehearsal (the orchestra's previous concert was at the NCH on Tuesday) and too great a tolerance for solecisms of intonation, ensemble and balance.

The announcer for this event, Mary Kennedy, made a point of telling us that this was the 10th successive year the RTECO had played at Arts Week. She may have intended to suggest a mood of celebration. But no out of the ordinary celebration was to be detected either in the orchestra's, playing or in the audience's response to it.