NCH, Dublin Tonight 8pm 10-35 01-4170000

SOUNDSET STRINGS

St Ann’s Church, Dawson St, Dublin Tonight 8pm 15

IOANA PETCU-COLAN (VIOLIN), RTÉCO/FERGUS SHEIL

GB Shaw Theatre, Carlow Tomorrow 8pm 20 059-9172400; Heritage Hotel, Portlaoise, Co Laois Thurs 8pm 18 057-8663355

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra offers up an adventurous programme tonight. Principal guest conductor Hannu Lintu (below) is coupling two early 20th-century symphonies: the Third by fellow Finn Sibelius and the 1923 Lyric Symphony by the Viennese composer Alexander Zemlinsky, a work setting poems by Rabindranath Tagore for soprano and baritone, which Zemlinsky himself compared to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

Also tonight at St Ann’s Church, SoundSet Strings (Larissa O’Grady, Catherine Humphreys, Karen Dervan, Nathan Sherman, Jenny Dowdall, Lioba Petrie and Caimin Gilmore) present a work by Zemlinsky’s rather more famous brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg, whose Verklärte Nacht shares the billing with pieces by Enda Bates, Emma O’Halloran, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, and Kevin Volans.

On Saturday the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Fergus Sheil sets out on a tour of venues not normally touched by orchestral music. The programme of Rossini's William Tell Overture, Philip Glass's Violin Concerto(with Ioana Petcu-Colan) and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, will be heard in Carlow's GB Shaw Theatre, the Heritage Hotel in Portlaoise on Thursday, and later in Navan's Solstice Arts Centre and the Wexford Opera House.