Tonight, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, the Austrian baritone, Wolfgang Holzmair, will sing Schubert. At the Coach House, Dublin Castle tomorrow night, the East Berlin-based Vogler Quartet will play Haydn, Ravel and Mozart's clarinet quintet. And on Sunday November 20th, the Takacs Quartet from Budapest will give the first of two Beethoven concerts at St Stephen's Church. Spot the connection? The well-informed Irish music-lover will need no prompting to supply the answer: John Ruddock, whose Limerick Music Association has been bringing top-notch chamber music groups and the occasional celebrity soloist to this country from all over Europe for over 30 years.

In fact, that Beethoven recital by the Takacs will be the Limerick Music Association's 200th concert, and tomorrow night's gig by the Vogler Quartet at Dublin Castle is a 75th birthday tribute to Ruddock himself. It will also be a celebration of the fact that for the next three years, the Vogler Quartet will be based not in East Berlin but in Sligo, where it will work closely with local music groups and schools in a programme of education, performance and tuition; a situation which, without the persistence and determination of the same Mr Ruddock, would almost certainly never have come to pass.

For when he first read about the Voglers in 1986 - some snippet somewhere to say that they had won the prestigious Evian string quartet competition in France - the Berlin Wall was very firmly up, and contact with eastern European musicians was, to put it mildly, a hit-and-miss affair.

"I thought, `how in heaven's name am I going to find them?' Eventually I wrote to an agent in East Berlin who wrote back and said he thought they were going to the west side of England in April, but he hadn't a clue where. I rang a very good friend at the BBC and she said, `I'll tell you where they might be, and that's Prussia Cove', an international music school in Cornwall.

"So I tracked them down and asked them if they'd like to come to Dublin. Of course they hadn't a penny - they'd been given just enough money by the East German government to get them through the course and home again - so I sent them the money for the boat. And they came and did two concerts; and do you know, they even brought a bottle of brandy, which they could ill afford. And they've been coming ever since."

The mixture of musical know-how and concern for the personal, human side of things is typical of Ruddock, who, despite growing up in a not especially musical family - his mother kept a newsagent's shop in Carlow - nurtured and developed his interest in music, first as an organ student and, later, during an 18-year stint as a maths teacher at St Andrews' School in Dublin - a time he says he enjoyed hugely, although it had its hairier moments. "I remember trying to teach preparatory French and being only one page ahead of my pupils - in those days you had to do anything and everything. Another year I was given the job of teaching singing in the school because of my love of music; and that was a disaster. You were constantly fighting with the children to get them to behave themselves, let alone sing!"

In 1963 he was appointed headmaster of Villiers' School in Limerick, and was quick to spot that, in an already sparse calendar of musical events, chamber music was almost non-existent in the city. "The Limerick Concert Society presented occasional symphony concerts, with the RTE orchestra visiting twice a year, and there was quite a reasonable operatic society with a good chorus who also put on one or two concerts a year. But for chamber music, nothing - apart from one or two concerts promoted by the Music Association of Ireland." Then one of his friends from the Gramophone Society mentioned that he had been offered a recital by the Goethe Institute (the German Institute of Cultural Relations, as it was then called) but that he couldn't afford it. "He mentioned what, to me, seemed a ridiculously small sum of money - you had to contribute to their travel expenses and put them up for the night, basically - and I was so excited I couldn't sleep for two nights."

He contacted the institute, the deal was done, and the Berlin Philharmonic Octet played a Rossini quartet, Mozart's horn quintet and the Schubert octet at St Mary's Cathedral in Limerick on February 16th, 1967. "We packed the place out - amazing, wasn't it - well, you see, it was the name, nobody from Limerick had heard any players from the Berlin Philharmonic before. So that was the first one, and we never really looked back." Although the Berlin Philharmonic concert pre-dates the Limerick Music Association - he didn't get that organised until slightly later - Ruddock regards it as his first LMA concert promotion, and adds, somewhat ruefully, "we've never had such a big audience since".

He has kept going, however, bringing in, in the process, such names as Isaac Stern, Dezso Ranki, Paul Tortelier, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Andras Schiff. In recognition of his services to music he has been awarded the Knight's Cross Order of Merit, First Class, by the Austrian government, the Pro Culture Medal by the Hungarian government and a D. Litt by the University of Limerick. And on the eve of his 75th birthday, his enthusiasm has not waned one jot: "You will come along to IMMA tonight, won't you? Holzmair singing Schubert - I just know it's going to be magic."

Booking for the Vogler Quartet at Dublin Castle tomorrow night at Music Network (01-6719429).

For Wolfgang Holzmair and the Takacs Quartet, phone the Limerick Music Association (01- 2804676).