Michael McHale

Finding a Voice festival’s all-female finale; Vanbrugh & Michael McHale; Philippe Cassard

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir/Kaspars Putninš, The Vanbrugh, RTÉ NSO/Harry Bicket

City of London Sinfonia with pianist Michael McHale and conductor Michael Collins, Quatuor Voce’s nine-stop tour and NI Opera stage Così fan tutte

City of London Sinfonia at the NCH, ‘This Beach’ revived from Fringe, BBC’s ‘Howards End’

The celebration of 100 years of Irish composition hits mid-century, revealing a dark age for orchestral music

Composing the Island festival is huge, but it neglects women and living composers under 30

Michael Dervan: Two evenings of music and words as part of Ireland 2016 got me thinking about the links that were missed

The NCH room - where the Treaty debates were held - has had a revamp. Will this fix the acoustic problems?

A performance of JS Bach’s Mass in B Minor was the real highlight of the arts festival’s first weekend

The Royal Irish Academy of Music’s collaborative concert was strong on Irish writers but weak on our composers

Getting the best out of an orchestra is a challenge, but the young Belfast conductor proves he can handle it with performances of Prokofiev, Borodin and Shostakovich

The looseness of the ensemble and problems with co-ordination proved largely insurmountable

Within the rampant fragmentation that’s been with us for so long, the victors have become much harder to identify

Several key vacancies persist at the top of RTÉ’s performing groups, and one man is currently covering three roles

From listening to Debussy to drowning, five performers from the recent Bantry festival share their ideas of life’s highs and lows