classical music

Saturday Morning Coffee Concerts. Elmwood Hall, 11am, Saturdays November 14th, 21st and 28th, 11 a.m.

The 1995 Cardiff Singer of the World, Katarina Karnus, the most talked-about tenor of the day, Ian Bostridge, and leading German baritone Olaf Bar are the performers in this year's Saturday morning recital slots. Major song cycles by Schumann feature in each of their programmes.

Rolf Hind. Harty Room, Monday 16th, Tuesday November 17th, 10 p.m. Belfast provides Irish listeners first opportunity to hear, in live performance and complete, one of the most widely-acclaimed piano works of recent years, the set of piano Etudes by Gyorgy Ligeti. Hind's second programme consists of just one work, the all-encompassing Concord Sonata of Charles Ives.

English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner, Waterfront Hall, November Friday 20th, 8 p.m.

A first visit to Belfast for John Eliot Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in a programme of Vivaldi (Gloria), Bach (the cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden) and Handel (Dixit Dominus).

Anne Sofie von Otter: Elmwood Hall, November 23rd, 8 p.m. Six years after her Dublin debut in an amplified Messiah at The Point, the alluring Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter gives her first recital on Irish soil in a programme yet to be announced.

Monsters of Grace: Waterfront Hall, November 29th, 6 p.m., 10 p.m. The climax of the festival focus on American minimalist Philip Glass (which starts on Tuesday November 24th) is reached in two performances of Monsters of Grace. This first major collaboration with Robert Wilson since Einstein on the Beach promises to be opera theatre for the digital age, with three-dimensional, computer-generated, stereoscopic images and Persian poetry in a work about the transformation of the ordinary world through divine love.

"You go to this opera like you go to a museum," says Wilson. "If you try to understand it you'll be confused".