Hugh Maguire's ConCorda, set up to provide youthful chamber music training, is to use the Arts Council's Artflight scheme to take 12 young string players to the first European String Chamber Music Course for Young Musicians in Ivrea near Turin in July. The Easter course by ConCorda, best thought of as a chamber music equivalent of the National Youth Orchestra, is underway in Cork at the moment, and its closing concert takes place on Saturday.

DIT Artist-in-Residence, Bernadette Greevy, has overseen some major projects recently, a Schubert opera in September and Messiah earlier this month. But the use of amplification cast a sour note over proceedings, distorting the outcome, rather like the use of performance enhancing drugs in sport or monosodium glutamate in a catering college. It's one thing (and not necessarily a pleasant one) to hear a Pavarotti or a Domingo amplified for a large crowd in an unsuitable acoustic. It's another thing entirely - and hardly an appropriate preparation for the normal demands of professional performance - to have students amplified at the National Concert Hall.