The best classical concerts and opera of the week

THURSDAY 21

Camerata Ireland
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Six instrumental soloists in an orchestral concert is quite a rarity. But it's exactly what Barry Douglas's Camerata Ireland offer at the NCH. Douglas is the evening's conductor, but plays himself only in Mozart's Concerto for two pianos, where he is joined by the rapidly rising young Cork pianist Kevin Jansson. The emphasis is on youth in all of the other works, too, with Killian White in Haydn's Cello Concerto in C, Tom Myles in Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, and Mairéad Hickey and Ed Creedon joining forces in Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola.

Ben Johnson, Sean Shibe
Edmund Rice Chapel, Waterford
English tenor Ben Johnson and Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe are teaming up for a six-stop tour promoted by Music Network. The big works are a suite by Bach (BWV996), Walton's Anon in Love (written for Peter Pears and Julian Bream in 1959) and Brian Bolger's specially commissioned Lawra. Folk songs and songs by Dowland, Rosseter, Morley, Beethoven, Schubert, Giuliani complete the evening. The tour visits Tralee (Friday), Dublin (Saturday), Kilkenny (Sunday), Castleconnell (Tuesday) and Clifden (Wednesday).

FRIDAY 22

RTÉ NSO/Anja Bihlmaier
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Swedish composer Anders Hillborg's Exquisite Corpse of 2002, which opens this week's RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra concert, lasts around a quarter of an hour. It's been described as "a rapid charge through Ligeti-complexity, homage to Stravinsky, chorales, hammering urban rhythms, late-romantic string writing with a discreet wink at Sibelius interspersed into the orchestral mist before the end". Soprano Ailish Tynan is the soloist in Richard Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder, and German conductor Anja Bihlmaier, who is making her Dublin debut, ends the concert with Brahms's First Symphony, a work that, as early as a year after its 1876 premiere, was described as a symphony that "really gets to people".