Joshua Ballance runs the High Barnet Classical Music Festival [joshuaballance.co.uk]

IF Benjamin Britten had followed the time-honoured theatre lore about avoiding children and animals, he’d never have composed Noye’s Fludde which is nothing but: a community opera with a vast, singing menagerie of children dressed as camels, elephants and monkeys marching two by two into the Ark that saves them from the biblical deluge. It’s a piece with the potential to be bedlam. But it’s also music of affecting genius, guaranteed to leave you tearful at the end when God gives humankind the rainbow as a token of his love.

So if you’ve never seen it, seize the chance next week, July 5, when 200 children join the South Bank Sinfonia for a performance at St Gabriel’s, Pimlico. They’ve made some changes to the text to highlight its significance to climate change, but otherwise you get the piece as Britten wrote it in the 1950s. Take a hankie. Details: pimlicomusicalfoundation.org.uk

• Flash back 400 years to July 4 1623, and you could have witnessed the death of one of the truly great English composers, William Byrd. The anniversary has been commemorated widely in the past few months. But for the actual day there’s more – including three concerts at Wigmore Hall – 1pm, 5pm, 7.30pm – in which the vocal group Cardinall’s Musick sing all the clandestine Mass settings, written for secret performance in times when Catholicism was outlawed. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• More recently, and more publicly, the composer Will Todd wrote his popular Mass in Blue which sets the traditional Catholic rite to jazz-inflected music. It’s per­formed this Saturday, July 1, by Highgate Choral Society at All Hallows Gospel Oak – a magnifi­cently grand space that doesn’t often resonate to the sound of tapping toes and swaying rhythms but will no doubt cope. As it will with the strange concert-pairing of palm court music by Max Jaffa. hcschoir.com

• For most of us, High Barnet is a destination at the far end of the Northern line we never reach. But recently it’s grown a music festival that’s worth those extra few stops on the tube – based at St John’s the Baptist Church, close to the station, and run by the young composer/conductor Joshua Ballance who puts together seriously thoughtful programmes. This year’s season runs June 30-July 16 and spotlights female composers, starting with Lilli Boulanger and Carol Jones played by the New London Orchestra.

On July 2 the “happening” Chinese-American pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu plays music by the equally “happening” Cassandra Miller alongside Ravel and Beethoven. While on July 14 Ballance’s own ensemble Mad Song play Helen Grime’s Pierrot Miniatures – a piece they couple with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which is one of those landmarks of modern music you have to experience once if only to decide you don’t like it. Who knows, you might be converted. Details: hbcmf.co.uk

• Finally, the ever-wonderful Proms at St Jude’s ends its current season this weekend with a night of Viennese orchestral favourites, June 30, and the London Mozart Players on July 2 resurrecting the String Symphony that Mendelssohn wrote aged only 14. That it was his 10th (!) is really quite annoying. Most of us at that age are content collecting stamps. promsatstjudes.org.uk