On a very wet Tuesday afternoon in Amster-dam, Galway woman Julie Feeney is about to head to the Paradiso venue to put the finishing touches to rehearsals for her concert that night. Her second album, Pages, will shortly be released. (Her first, 13 Songs, won the inaugural Choice Music Prize and subsequently drifted across the pond to rave reviews which saw her being signed to Sony.) The new offering is a chamber-pop affair, quite light and breezy compared to the emotional and musical isolation of her debut. Pages was recorded in a six-hour session at the Irish Chamber Orchestra Studio in Limerick, where Feeney conducted every arrangement she had written.

She's in Amsterdam because the Paradiso Orchestra has invited her over to perform and interpret her songs within their context. The Paradiso comprises some of the best musicians around, including members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra. Feeney, you might say, isn't your usual singer-songwriter.

She calls herself a composer/performer, a far more accurate title for someone who plays ten instruments (expertly), is a former professional choral singer with the National Chamber Choir and a composer for short films, contemporary dance and other performances, aside from her other startling array of achievements (which include three Masters degrees and a career that spans catwalk model and lecturer in education.)

The final allotment of rehearsals starts at 3pm and goes on until 7pm, with the concert scheduled to start at 8.30pm. Wearing a grey peaked cap, red trainers, a black T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, Feeney takes control. Watching an orchestra prepare to rehearse is not exactly frantic, but there is chaos there, and it's Feeney's job to gather a semblance of meaning. Three hours in, her energy only seems to be increasing.

"No, I'm on the off beat... more energy... I love the quality of the strings, that's exactly it... guys, guys, in bar 59... it needs to be warmer there... lots of weight on the basses, please... in 70, the tempo changes... can we go from F?" It's a little different to your average soundcheck.

When she sings, the versatility of her voice is striking – it's by far the most dextrous instrument in the orchestra. Her compositions are impeccable, often with a minimalistic quality – every note is picked cautiously like a pearl from a mollusc and handled with the utmost delicacy. The results of this approach on her first album were what many people called an acquired taste. On her second, she has become slightly more accessible, with maybe the strongest legacy of the compositions being the melodies, which resonate in the mind long after they are performed.

"I didn't have the 'second album thing'. I wanted to use an orchestra," she says the next morning, drinking hot chocolate outside a bar. "There was a warmth I wanted this time. I wanted to have a bit of humour and slightly represent my other, theatrical side. I wasn't thinking about my previous album or my next album; I was thinking about orchestration, conducting, the vibe and the atmosphere of it that I wanted to create. It was about people, relating thoughts and framing them in a way other people could relate to, as opposed to me just singing 'I'm aching for you', although there is one song that's like that."

Feeney admits that she's intense ("Oh yeah!"). Last year, she was working so much on her music that she went out maybe seven or eight times in total.

"I think people think I'm bonkers. They say 'What? How do you do that?'" She shrugs. "I'm probably quite obsessive about whatever I'm doing. It comes from the work itself."

Her thoughts wander in and out of sentences, and she spends a lot of time talking about the grace people feel when going through tough times ('Grace' is a track on the new record).

"I felt very resilient, I felt I could help people or something", she says, then switches to another semi-related topic that has something to do with the atmosphere she was trying to convey in her songs. "I would hate to fall out with somebody and not address it before the sun goes down," she muses at one point.

The performance at the Paradiso is electric and eclectic, a mixture of avant-garde classical music, animated visuals, Feeney's compositions, and a captive audience. She radiates in a red dress which she was worried was "a bit Dorothy". At the end, the audience bursts into applause, prompting an encore of the first single from Pages, 'Love Is A Tricky Thing', which is followed by a standing ovation.

At drinks with the orchestra afterwards, some people talk about the fairytale quality to her songs. Perhaps the highlight was 'Stay', an emotionally loaded but simple track from the new album which echoes some of the sadness on her debut release. It's a performance that would seem impossible to create in Ireland, which begs the question of how her contemporaries view her when she's off doing this kind of stuff.

"They probably don't know what to make of me," she laughs, as she drinks beer after the show, while her brother helps downstairs selling CDs. "But I still think I have to just do what I do. Everything comes from what I want to express inside. The way that I present it, yeah, it's different, but I can't really help that."

That sense of individualism is strong in her. She speaks of the freedom she has as an artist upon realising that she is free to do whatever she wants, that guilt isn't constructive, that you should live with the motto 'begin today'.

"I think you should very much be what you are. Constantly develop yourself. Cultivate what it is you are. It's like a plough. If you plough through the same field, you will continue to find things. You might have a bit of an idea, but then you'll know there are other things there, so you have to wait for them to surface. I have no problem with getting ideas, but sometimes you know you haven't got the whole picture. But it's amazing when it comes together then." It sure is.

Julie Feeney plays Crawdaddy, Dublin on 10 June and the Galway Arts Festival on 16 July