The classical music season will be suspended until 2007. We have five weeks (at most) of normal concert-going left before Messianic and festive doom is unleashed upon us with the fury of a thousand percussionists playing a thousand sleigh bells in an evening's thousandth rendition of 'Sleigh Ride'.

It's a good time of year, then, to organise a festival for which the tag line, "and now for something completely different", couldn't be more appropriate. Limerick audiences will be familiar with the Sionna festival . . . an annual nineday festival of music, song and dance, which is presented by the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick. Readers of this space will be delighted to know that with the delightful world/traditional music element of this festival is combined some intriguing classical music from France, India and our own island. Our Gallic friends appear on this festival bill through the medium of Dialogos, a Paris-based early music vocal ensemble. Through the music of Latin and Glagolitic polyphony and Gregorian chant, their evening concert in St Mary's Cathedral on 13 November will tell the tale of Tondal's Vision, a popular 12th-century visionary story which traces the soul's journey after it quits the unconscious man's body. (Would've been perfect for Hallowe'en) A Western audience's appreciation of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music might go no further than Menuhin's flirtation with the genre but this festival boasts two of the highest ranked proponents of this amazing music. Sitarist Subroto Roy Chowdhury and tabla (Indian drums) player Udit Pankhania will demonstrate the mesmerising virtuosity of this music to a lunchtime audience on Tuesday 14 in the Music Academy, UL.

Going under the title, 'Superstrings', the piano/violin duo of Brian Foster and Jack Liebeck will bring a scientific slant to the Sionna. In a daytime lecture and evening concert on 15 November, the duo will examine Einstein's involvement with music, his love of the violin and the music of JS Bach and tie such artistic niceties in with many of the great man's most fundamental and revolutionary physical tenets. Two piano trio recitals, one featuring the music of 19th-century Limerick composer George Alexander Osborne, lend themselves to the classical end of proceedings, as Soundings on 16 November does to the forum of contemporary music, sound art and media interaction but the big concert as far as this column is concerned has to be that which takes place on 17 November.

Barry Douglas is a well-known figure on the soloist circuit but it might be less well-known that he recently set up a chamber orchestra comprising Ireland's most exceptionally talented musicians and called it Camerata Ireland.

Names such as Ioana Petcu-Colan and Elizabeth Cooney appear among his entourage which also draws from Northern Ireland's creme de la creme, including the ensemble's leader Michael D'Arcy. With Camerata Ireland, Douglas has released two recordings of Beethoven piano concertos on the Satirino label and plans to complete the series in 2007, a year which will also see the orchestra open the Smithsonian festival in Washington. Their 2006 International Series is just around the corner however. With the first of that series set for the Theatre de Champs Elysees on 23 November, London's Cadogan Hall on the 28 and the Dublin's NCH on the 29, this Sionna concert in St Michael's of Denmark Street will be a sneak preview of the series' programme, an allMozart, all-piano concerto affair.

Douglas's manifesto for the orchestra is to "carry the vision of a new island of Ireland to the world". Pour forth thy vision Barry. Make music.

The time is right.