The National Concert Hall (NCH) has announced a series of chamber music concerts to take place later this year.

From September to December, the venue will present performances of Irish quartets including the ConTempo Quartet, the Lir Quartet, the Lumiere Quartet and the Ficino Quartet, as well as soloists such as pianist Máire Carroll and bass baritone Conor Biggs with pianist Michel Stas.

Opening the series on 15 September is a performance by the ConTempo Quartet of string quartets by Mozart and Beethoven, as well as Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova’s On a bench in the shade and the Dublin premiere of Raymond Deane’s String Quartet No.7.

International concert pianist Máire Carroll will perform two nights dedicated to the genre of the piano étude on 26 and 27 September. Carroll – who next month will release an album of Philip Glass piano études on Delphian Records – will play works by Glass as well as by Hélène de Montgeroult, Chopin, Debussy, Ligeti, Unsuk Chin and Nikolai Kapustin.

The Lir Quartet, comprising Siobhán Doyle (violin), Kirsty Main (violin), Ed Creedon (viola) and Killian White (cello), will present the Dublin premiere of Harry O’Connor’s Summer Idyll as part of a concert including works by Fanny Mendelssohn, Bach and Brahms (27 October); and on 3 November, bass baritone Conor Biggs and pianist Michel Stas will perform the latest concert in their Schubertreise series – in which they perform the works of Schubert – including works inspired by the poetry of 18th century poet Novalis.

Also performing as part of the series is violinist Mairéad Hickey’s Pirosmani Quartet, who will perform Dave Flynn’s traditional-classical piece The Cranning (29 September); the Esposito Quartet, performing works by Beethoven, Paul Frost, Janáček and Wolf (13 October); the Lumiere Quartet, who will perform Mozart and Mendelssohn, as well as the Dublin premiere of Caterina Schembri’s Grüner Strahl (10 November); and the Banbha Quartet, whose performance will include works by Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Dublin premiere of Seán Doherty’s Mazovia to Meenbanad.

The series will conclude on 8 December with a performance by the Ficino Quartet. They will present works by Amanda Feery, Garrett Sholdice, Cora Venus Lunny and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly that were commissioned by the National String Quartet Foundation in 2020 as part of their Beethoven Reflected project. The project marked the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth and the works are inspired by his String Quartet No. 15 A minor quartet Op. 132.

All string quartet performances are presented in association with the National String Quartet Foundation. For further programme information and tickets, visit www.nch.ie.

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