The best classical music concerts the week has to offer

Saturday, 23rd 

RIAS Kammerchor/Justin Doyle
National Concert Hall, Dublin
nch.ie

Brahms’s two sets of Liebeslieder are at the heart of the first Dublin concert by Berlin’s RIAS Kammerchor. The waltzes, which are among the composer’s most tuneful works, are scored for vocal quartet and piano duet and were originally intended for domestic performance.

The programme, devised by the choir’s chief conductor Justin Doyle, weaves arrangements by Reger, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Quilter and Doyle himself through the evening as well as some of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, which were originally conceived for piano duet. The pianists are the Turkish duo Bahar & Ufuk Dördüncü.

Friday, 29th

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra/Jean Deroyer
National Concert Hall, Dublin
nch.ie

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Composer and former head of music at RTÉ John Kinsella is the recipient of this year's National Concert Hall Lifetime Achievement Award. Kinsella is the most prolific Irish symphonist and the presentation of the award will be made at the RTÉ NSO's premiere of the 87-year-old's Symphony No. 11.

Jean Sibelius is an important influence and, as a gesture of homage, Kinsella has used fragments by Sibelius that may have been intended for the Eighth Symphony the Finnish master spoke about writing but never completed.

The 7.30pm concert, which is conducted by Jean Deroyer, ends with Sibelius’s Third Symphony and features Vadym Kholodenko, gold medal winner at the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto.

Ulster Orchestra/Tito Muñoz
Ulster Hall, Belfast
ulsterorchestra.org.uk

An American conductor, Tito Muñoz (music director of the Phoenix Symphony) and a French pianist (Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, a prolific recording artist) are the guides in the Ulster Orchestra’s evening of Czech and Hungarian music.

The concert opens with Zoltán Kodály’s Dances of Marosszék (inspired by the music of a region that is modern-day Romania) and then Bartók’s final piano concerto, the lightest of his three, is followed by Dvorák’s exuberant Symphony No 8.