Winter is coming: this week’s classical music highlights

FRIDAY 20

The Four Seasons in Song  The Mac, Belfast, until Sun bbc.in/2xLuEWx BBC Northern Ireland is presenting The Four Seasons in Song over three days at the Mac in Belfast. The series is masterminded by pianist Joseph Middleton, who partners a different singer in each of the four concerts. Tenor Robin Tritschler deals with spring on Friday evening at 7.30pm. Soprano Fatma Said, winner of the 2016 Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, covers summer at midday on Saturday. Autumn falls to mezzo soprano Sophie Rennert on Saturday evening, and baritone Ashley Riches closes the series with winter on Sunday afternoon at 3pm. The concerts are free but ticketed.

WEDNESDAY 25

Irish Baroque Orchestra NCH Kevin Barry Recital Room, Dublin 7.30pm The last concert in the Irish Baroque Orchestra's Prodigies and Premieres series at the NCH's Kevin Barry Recital Room explores Irish connections. The orchestra's leader, Claire Duff, gives the first performance of Derry composer Seán Doherty's Divisions II for baroque violin and also plays his Divisions I. She's presenting two Corelli Violin Sonatas with embellishments by English violinist and composer Matthew Dubourg, who spend most of his professional career in Dublin. And cellist Sarah McMahon performs a cello sonata by one of Dubourg's teachers, the Italian composer Francesco Geminiani, who also visited Dublin a number of times, and died in the city in 1762.

Life on the road: Playing gigs to no one. Losing money. Sleeping on floors

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And So I Watch You From Afar return with a formidable display of power

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Unfamiliar with Irish-language opera ‘Eithne’? You are not alone

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THURSDAY 26

RTÉ NSO/Case Scaglione University Concert Hall, Limerick 8pm €26/24 uch.ie; also Dublin Fri 27th Dubliner Charles Villiers Stanford's 1914 Irish Rhapsody No 1 opened last year's Composing the Island celebration of a century of Irish music. It's back again this year in the hands of American conductor Case Scaglione. The programme also includes Saint-Saëns's First Cello Concerto with Richard Harwood, and Czech composer Josef Suk's masterpiece, the Asrael Symphony, a double memorial, begun after the death of his teacher and father-in-law, Antonín Dvorak, and completed in the wake of the tragically early death of his wife, Otilie. Scaglione will be back in Ireland for a lunchtime concert of Mozart, Ravel and Stravinsky with the Ulster Orchestra on Tuesday, November 21st.