WHAT have we here . . . a performance of 'Messiah' at Easter? But that's only performed at Christmas, isn't it? The rumour that it was premiered on 13 April 1742 was dismissed long ago, surely? Apparently not . . . it's entirely true. Well I'll be damned.

So, the Christmas/Messiah thing is an invented tradition to ensure full-house concerts? Apparently so.

Temple Bar Cultural Trust has committed to this Easter/Messiah rising and begins its campaign next weekend with a series of public actions, all of which come under the Handel Festival Week.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right.

On Friday 13 April, Our Lady's Choral Society will give 'Messiah on the Street', a free lunchtime (1pm) performance of popular excerpts from it. The street in question is Fishamble Street, home to the Contemporary Music Centre, where Barra Boydell, NUI Maynooth music historian, gives a 'Handel Talk and Walk' that same day . . . an 11am talk and a 2:30pm walk. The suitably curious can experience 'A Day in the Life of Mr Handel' on 19 April in St Patrick's Cathedral.

Reservations must be made and all details are available on www. templebar. ie.

Under the auspices of the Contemporary Music Centre, a particularly noteworthy event takes place on 15 April at 2.30pm entitled 'Passacaille: An 18th Century Stroll', which takes its name from the featured work in question. To commemorate the festival, a composition by prominent Irish composer Benjamin Dwyer, an homage to Handel, if you will, is to be premiered in St Audeon's Church.

Trio Quattro, which comprises Jenny Robinson (recorder), Anita Vedres (baroque violin), Malachy Robinson (violone) and Ian Pritchard (harpsichord), will perform Dwyer's new work alongside a selection of sonatas by Handel, Telemann and Quantz.

Opera Theatre Company present their 'Young Associate Artists' in another free lunchtime recital at St Patrick's 18 April and the festival week finishes as it began, in the aptest of fashions, with a full performance of 'Messiah' in Christ Church Cathedral, as performed by the choir thereof and St Cecilia Orchestra, on Friday 20 April at 7.30pm.

All in all, this makes for a delightfully accessible and yet diverse festival but the burning question is . . . will the audience stand for the hallelujah chorus?

For something completely different next weekend, you'd best be getting to Sligo, as eager audiences have been doing at this time of year, every year, since 2002. The Sligo New Music Festival could well outdo the 2007 RTE Living Music Festival, such are the unique threads with which this year's programme is so imaginatively sewn together.

Festival director Ian Wilson has curated a weekend of contemporary Spanish music, spread among five concerts at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery from Friday to Sunday.

The opening concert will present the world premieres of two works for soprano and accordion by Irish composer Grainne Mulvey and young Madrid-based Italian composer Aureliano Cattaneo, to whose increasingly-admired work Irish audiences will get their first live introduction over the course of this weekend with three more of his works programmed.

Garrett Sholdice, Frank Corcoran and John McLachlan complete the bill of Irish composers, with Spanish composer Gabriel Erkoreka also featuring heavily in the line-up.

Aside from the two evening concerts on Saturday, a 4pm "round-table" discussion between Cattaneo, Erkoreka and Wilson (we can presume it's on the subject of contemporary music, at least) might pique one's interest.

English-born, formerly Brazilbased guitarist Graham Anthony Devine is among an elite list of performers, which includes, in a bizarre rarity of programming, two accordion players, Dermot Dunne and Bulgarian Krassimir Sterev. Sure, why not?