Saturday, January 5th
Chamber Music Gathering 2019
NCH Kevin Barry Recital Room, Dublin 11am; NCH Studio, Dublin 1pm; Newman University Church, St Stephen's Green, Dublin 4.30pm €15 nch.ie
The living composer-free, Irish composer-free, female composer-free zone that is the National Concert Hall’s Chamber Music Gathering is back in its first Saturday in January slot.
The Gathering, which is presented by the NCH in association with the National String Quartet Foundation, takes advantage of the homecomings of the holiday period to bring together players of different generations, mixing and matching them into ensembles for three separate concerts. There’s an innovation this year that sees wind instruments featuring for the first time.
The opening 11am programme juxtaposes Mozart's String Quintet and Brahms's Clarinet Quintet, with Seamus Wylie, the first wind player to feature in the series. The closing 4.30pm concert sandwiches Nielsen's Wind Quintet between Brahms's String Quintet in F, Op. 88, and Schubert's String Quintet. And, in between, the 1pm lunchtime concert has Beethoven's String Quintet in E flat, Op. 4, Erwin Schulhoff's String Sextet and Dvorak's String Quintet in E flat, Op. 97.
Friday, January 11th
Nathalie Stutzmann/RTÉ NSO
NCH, Dublin, 7.30pm €15-€38.50 nch.ie
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is back in action with its principal guest conductor, Nathalie Stutzmann. Stutzmann's repertoire choices are mostly works from the heart of the classical canon, and this programme is no exception.
Haydn's Surprise Symphony (last heard from the orchestra in 2009) is followed by Beethoven's First Piano Concerto (with leading Norwegian pianist Christian Ihle Hadland as soloist), and the evening ends with the sunny buoyancy of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.
