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

DAVID LEIGH, CHARLES HARRISON (ORGAN)

St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire Sun 8pm €12 087-9048190

Concert planning at RTÉ has fallen victim to cutbacks by the national broadcaster. The summer orchestral concerts at the National Concert Hall were finalised so late that details were not available in the hall’s printed calendar.

There’s still no word on what’s in the RTÉ National Symphony next subscription series, due to start in September. And the calendar on the performing groups section of the RTÉ website is actually a total blank from September onwards. It’s hard not to imagine that such a huge information gap won’t impact on the box office success of the concerts.

Maybe RTÉ hopes that Russian music in the hand will prove to be worth more than Russian music in the bush, and that people will flock to tonight’s programme of works by Tchaikovsky (the Polonaise and Waltz from Eugene Onegin), Shostakovich (the First Piano Concerto with Dublin-residing Russian pianist Elisaveta Blumina (above), and Graham Hastings on obligato trumpet), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade. We’ll see. The conductor is Timothy Henty, who’s previous outings in Dublin were in Gilbert Sullivan with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

Recent years have brought more opportunities to hear four hands at one keyboard, although the number of such duet concerts still remains small. Mostly, the concerts are by pianists, but on Sunday you can hear four hands together on the Rieger organ of St Michael’s Church in Dún Laoghaire. The performers are David Leigh and Charles Harrison; the composers represented are Mozart, Mendelssohn, Langlais, Tomkins, Carleton, Leighton and Andrew Johnstone – yes, the same Andrew Johnstone whose name appears at the end of music reviews in this newspaper.