Brett Dean’s ICO debut: This week’s classical highlights

Wednesday, September 11th

ICO/Brett Dean
Monkstown Parish Church irishchamberorchestra.com
Australian composer and viola player Brett Dean makes his performing debut with the Irish Chamber Orchestra in Monkstown Parish Church. He opens with Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music and then interleaves the five "interludes" that make up his Short Stories of 2005 with arrangements of Bach by Mozart. He adds Paul Hindemith's Trauermusik, the piece the composer wrote in a day for a BBC broadcast in London after the death of King George V ("from 11 to 5 I did some fairly hefty mourning," he wrote to his publisher) as well as the lengthy opening Adagio from Michelle Castelletti's arrangement of  Mahler's Tenth Symphony for chamber orchestra. The concert starts at 8pm and is repeated in Cork on Thursday and Limerick on Friday.

Friday 13th

Fiachra Garvey, RTÉ NSO/Mihhail Gerts
NCH, Dublin nch.ie
Pianist Fiachra Garvey, the founder and artistic director of the West Wicklow Festival, is the soloist in Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Estonian conductor Mihhail Gerts. The Rachmaninov is the witty but technically demanding filling in a programme that opens with the sordid world of Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin Suite and closes with the inimitable rawness of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The concert starts at 7.30pm.

Westport Chamber Music Festival
Westport, Co, Mayo https://www.westportchambermusic.ie
The programme of the three-day Westport Chamber Music Festival is nothing if not safe and sure. This year's big works include Beethoven's Archduke Trio (with violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky, cellist Adrian Brendel and pianist Hugh Tinney), Bach's Goldberg Variations arranged for string trio (Sitkovetsky and Brendel with viola player Eivind Ringstad), Mozart's Clarinet Quintet (Julian Bliss, Sitkovetsky, Mairéad Hickey, Ringstad and Isang Enders) and Brahms's wonderfully Hungarian Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 (Hickey, Simon Aspell, Enders and Daria van den Bercken). Just three living composers are featured, Paul Schoenfield (his Clarinet Trio is played by Bliss, Sitkovetsky and Finghin Collins), Osvaldo Golijov (Mariel, played by Enders and percussionist Alex Petcu), and Deirdre Gribbin (her early How to Make the Water Sound, played by Hickey, Miriam Roycroft and van den Bercken).