A free double bass concerto in the Ulster Hall: what more could you want?

FRIDAY 25

UO/Olari Elts Ulster Hall, Belfast 7.45pm Adm free – When is the last time you heard a double bass concerto in the concert hall? Or have you ever heard one at all? Either way, there's one on offer in BBC Northern Ireland's final free invitation concert with the Ulster Orchestra. The work is the 1948 Concerto by the Estonian composer Eduard Tubin (1905-82) who fled to Sweden in 1944 just before the Soviet invasion of Estonia. The concert, which is conducted by one of Estonia's leading conductors, Olari Elts, also includes Mahler's Totenfeier (Funeral Rites), the 1888 symphonic poem which was later revised to become the first movement of the composer's Second Symphony, and another work from the same year, Richard Strauss's Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration).

THURSDAY 31

Musici Ireland NCH John Field Room, Dublin 1.05pm €15 nch.ie – The chamber ensemble Musici Ireland, which was founded in 2012 by viola-player Beth McNinch, has been celebrating its fifth birthday with a residency at the National Concert Hall for a series of five lunchtime concerts during the month of August. Today's final programme pairs two of the most famous string sextets. Richard Strauss's last opera, Capriccio, opens with the rehearsal of a string sextet — one of the characters is a composer — and the sextet has entered the chamber music repertoire in its own right. It's coupled with the Brahms's early String Sextet in B flat, Op 18, the work with which the history of the string sextet as we know it really begins.

THURSDAY 31

City of Birmingham SO/Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla NCH, Dublin 8pm €29.50-€72.50 01-4170000 – The National Concert Hall opens its new International Concert Series with a return visit by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. It's the orchestra's first Irish appearance under its current music director, the Lithuanian conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, whose 31st birthday falls two days before the concert, on Tuesday 29th. Her programme includes a Baltic element in the form of Latvian composer Peteris Vasks's Cantabile. The soloist in Elgar's Cello Concerto is Frenchman Gautier Capuçon. And the closing work is a late outpouring of mid-20th-century romanticism, Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 3 of 1935-36.