This week's musical headliners are Judith Weir, Monica Huggett and Les Petits Violons de Cornell

Major concerts tonight and over the weekend from the Department of Music, free and open to the public, feature the work of visiting artists, composer Judith Weir and violinist Monica Huggett.

· Ensemble X, with conductors Steven Stucky and Mark Davis Scatterday, and featuring soprano Judith Kellock, mezzo soprano Janice Felty and pianist Xak Bjerken, kick things off with "Music of Judith Weir," tonight, beginning at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall.

In recent decades, composers from the British Isles have been creating some of the most imaginative and polished music anywhere. In its last concert of the 2001-02 season, Ensemble X highlighted one of the them, Judith Weir, from Aberdeen, Scotland, featuring four of her works. In October 1999, Ensemble X presented two of Weir's pieces, and one of those, The Consolations of Scholarship, will be performed tonight, again featuring Felty. Also featured tonight will be Kellock, singing eight roles from Weir's King Harald's Saga, a three-act
opera from 1979 scored for solo soprano only and packed into just under 10 minutes. And this time the composer will be on hand for the concert and, with Stucky, for the pre-concert discussion from 7:15 to 7:45 p.m.

Weir since 1985 has been an artistic director of the Spitalfields Festival (jointly with Michael Berkely and Anthony Payne until the summer of 1997). She is the holder of a Critics' Circle Award (1994) and Lincoln Center's Stoeger Prize (1997). And in 1995, she was made a commander of the British Empire.

· One of the foremost Baroque violinists of our time, Monica Huggett visits the campus for two events next week. The first is a concert with fortepianist Malcolm Bilson on Wednesday, April 24, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall, featuring violin sonatas by Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. The following evening, April 25, also at 8 p.m., Huggett returns to the Barnes Hall stage as guest director of Les Petits Violons de Cornell, a string orchestra composed of Cornell doctoral students as well as string players from the Eastman School of Music and the Ithaca College School of Music. The ensemble began playing in 2000 at Cornell under the guidance of music professor Neal Zaslaw, an authority on historical performance and author of numerous books and articles on the subject. The group's music directors are Wiebke Thormählen and Thomas Irvine, both Cornell doctoral students and professional musicians with years of experience between them in Europe and the United States as performers on historical instruments.

Huggett has an active international career as soloist, director and chamber musician. She has recorded for EMI, Decca, Teldec, Philips and many other record labels. In 1998 she released two discs of the complete Bach unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas for Virgin Classics. In recent years, directing has taken a larger proportion of her time, with regular guest appearances with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the European Union Baroque Orchestra, and she recently became artistic director of the Portland Baroque Orchestra in Oregon. She is also the founder/director of the Baroque ensemble Sonnerie, which tours extensively in Europe and the United States, and she is professor of Baroque violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was made a fellow in 1994.