It’s no help to an orchestra if, 20 minutes before the start of their scheduled Edinburgh concert, their instruments are still in the air, en route from Prague. Even a performance of John Cage’s silent piece 4’33” needs some instrument in proximity. So there was no Wednesday night concert for the Staatskapelle Dresden.

That cancellation wasn’t the day’s only disappointment. At the Queen’s Hall morning concert, Katarina Karnéus’s mezzo-soprano may not have been cruising at 30,000ft, but the voice of the 1994 winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition sometimes didn’t seem in the best of health.

Blame this in part on her repertoire, a “Singer of the World” tour of languages and song styles. For all the tenderness displayed at the heart of Poulenc’s cycle Metamorphoses, French isn’t her ideal language, especially when vowels fly at high speed.

Paganini, the crazy finale to these poems by Louise de Vilmorin, desperately needed a suppler tone than Karnéus’s decibels offered. Somewhat stilted delivery, and a pillar-like stance, also interfered with her Italian selection.

Happily, after the interval Karnéus remembered she was Scandinavian, and delivered a performance of Grieg’s six Ibsen songs, Op 25, of such flexible beauty and understanding that faith was restored.

It has been fashionable to slight Grieg and his songs, but Karnéus used every corner of her voice, from its fluting top to unusually sturdy bottom register, to display their subtle virtues. And she restored her gift for penetrating phrasing: Med en vadlije (With a Water Lily) floated before us so tenderly, but still with the troubling intimations the song needs. Throughout the recital, her gifted piano accompanist Johan Ullén showed great dexterity and colour range.

In Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder and Szymanowski’s Hafiz songs, the idiom beckoned tantalisingly from around the corner. But the final Strauss section saw Karnéus properly home and secure, brightly exuberant in the clamour of Kling. It made you pity the poor Staatskapelle Dresden, bereft of kling, klang – any sound at all.