If your New Year’s resolution was to hear some different music, you can make good on that promise this week.

EARLY MUSIC:
>> Every January the Folger Consort leaves its regular home at the Folger Shakespeare Library to give a New Year concert at Washington National Cathedral. If the concerts in 2008, 2007, and 2006 are any indication, this year’s program of Baroque sacred music, including Vivaldi’s famous setting of the Gloria, will be well worth hearing on Friday and Saturday (January 9 and 10, 8 p.m.). Tickets: $30 to $42.

>> For even older music, try the program of English Renaissance music by Gibbons, Byrd, and Tye offered by the viol consort of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society on Sunday (January 11, 7:30 p.m.) in the Renwick Gallery (1661 Pennsylvania Ave. NW). To learn something about this music, attend the pre-concert lecture at 6:30 p.m. Tickets: $26.

FREE CONCERTS:
>> Cellist Amit Peled is giving three concerts on the free Sunday series at the Phillips Collection this month, beginning this afternoon and continuing the following two Sundays (January 4, 11, and 18, 4 p.m.). The concert is free, but admission to the museum is not.

>> Also on Sunday (January 11, 6:30 p.m.) the Ma’alot Wind Quintet will play music by Barber, Ligeti, Mendelssohn, and Piazzolla at the National Gallery of Art. This is in conjunction with a major celebration of the music of Felix Mendelssohn, who was born in 1809. Find out about Mendelssohn’s relationship with the visual arts at a pre-concert lecture at 6 p.m. The lecture and concert are in a slightly different location, the lecture hall on the ground floor of the West Building (use the Constitution Ave. entrance at Sixth St. NW).