Opera in Waterford and an Irish debut: This week’s classical music highlights

WEDNESDAY 29 

Blackwater Valley Opera Festival
Lismore and other centres in Co Waterford until June 3rd. blackwatervalleyoperafestival.com

The vision for the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival (formerly the Lismore Opera Festival) is to expand and grow to cover two weekends. The festival's production of Donizetti's Don Pasquale can be seen on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, with Michele Govi in the title role, Emmett O'Hanlon as Malatesta and Aoife Gibney as Norina. The opera is directed by Pierre Emmanuel Rousseau, designed by Slawek Narwid and conducted by Darren Hargan. The festival's series of concerts has been developed to stretch from Thursday to Monday, and this year there's a second opera, Balfe's The Sleeping Queen, at St Carthage's Cathedral on Saturday afternoon.

FRIDAY 31

RTÉ NSO/Kazuki Yamada
NCH, Dublin

Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto is at the opposite end of his achievement to his opera Die tote Stadt, which the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra performed in concert in April. The concerto is full of the flavour of Hollywood because that's what the composer infused it with, recycling material from film scores in the making of the work. It opens the last concert of the NSO's current season, with Simone Lamsma as soloist. The much-praised Japanese conductor Kazuki Yamada makes his debut in this 7.30pm concert, which ends with Richard Strauss's pictorially imposing Alpine Symphony.