We got all that holiday concert business out of the way last week, which allows us to focus on music of the non-mistletoe variety. What is the perfect antidote to syrupy holiday music or yet another performance of Handel’s Messiah? Some bracing, dissonant contemporary music should be just the thing.

Violist Kim Kashkashian (photo by Julien Jordes / ECM Records)

>> At her last area recital, this past April, violist Kim Kashkashian featured a piece by Romanian Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian. She returns to Washington on Tuesday (December 8, 7:30 p.m.) with an entire Armenian Musical Evening, partnering with Mansurian himself on the piano and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, sponsored by the Smithsonian Resident Associates program at the National Museum of Natural History. General admission tickets are $25, but full-time students may qualify to pay $15.

>> From Armenia on to Romania, with a concert sponsored by the Romanian Cultural Institute on Wednesday night (December 9, 7:30 p.m.) at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Violinist Remus Azoitei and pianist Eduard Stan will present Enescu-Brahms: European Encounters, a program pairing works by Romanian composer George Enescu with those of Johannes Brahms.

>> On the same evening (December 9, 7:30 p.m.) the free concert by the Shanghai String Quartet at the Freer Gallery of Art will feature the Washington premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s third string quartet, as well as music by Beethoven and Debussy.

>> On Thursday (December 10, 8 p.m.) the University of Maryland Wind Ensemble and string players from the UM Symphony Orchestra will perform an alluring program of music by Schuller, more Enescu, and Edgard Varèse’s Amériques at the Clarice Smith Center.