You could hear a lot of good classical music this week, much of it at no cost other than the trip to the concert hall. The biggest events this week are not going to be cheap, but the performances of these visiting musicians do promise to be extraordinary. We will be bringing you reviews, of course. For more concerts, go to our Classical Week in Washington feature at Ionarts.

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>> The first of these big events is coming up quickly, Monday night (February 13, 8 p.m.), with the concert by the orchestra of the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, led by their much-admired conductor, Mariss Jansons, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Again this is the work of Washington Performing Arts Society, who brought us Alfred Brendel last week. The orchestra was in London recently, where their performance of Shostakovich disappointed one reviewer because “the warmth and nobility of this orchestra conspired against it.” Washington listeners will not have this “problem” to worry about, since the Royal Concertgebouw will be performing Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 and Richard Strauss’s tone poem Ein Heldenleben, to which this orchestra can safely apply all of its legendary warmth and nobility. Tickets: $45 to $115.

>> A conductor who could not be more different from the patrician Mariss Jansons, the Russian Valery Gergiev, will also be at the Kennedy Center Opera House this week. On Sunday (February 19, 3 p.m.), he will be leading the Kirov Opera in a traveling production of Puccini’s last opera, Turandot. Other performances are scheduled for next Thursday (February 23, 7:30 p.m.) and Saturday (February 25, 7:30 p.m.). Tickets: $45 to $200. Their production of Wagner’s Parsifal will be in the Classical Music Agenda next week. The Kirov production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov last year was a knockout.