Catch Carmelites at the Albert Hall [Fernando Losada Rodríguez]

OPERAS about nuns present a problem musically – because by definition there aren’t many male roles and you don’t get breadth of vocal sound. But still, composers do it: think Puccini’s Suor Angelica. And there is one great modern opera that’s awash with nuns: Poulenc’s The Dialogues of the Carmelites, which has been playing this summer at Glyndebourne and travels to the Proms on August 7.

Carmelites is an extraordinary piece: neurotic, fervent, passionate, deeply Catholic, based on the true story of a conventual community during the French Revolution who refused to give up the habit (so to speak) and went to the guillotine as a consequence. En masse. It’s not easy theatre or an easy listen, written largely in the form of anguished recitative. But when it breaks out into melody it’s ravishing. And if the final scene – when one by one the nuns go to the blade – is done effectively, it leaves you devastated; as you may well be by this production which has had ecstatic reviews on home turf.

At the Albert Hall you only get a semi-staging; but the music will be there in full force, and it packs a punch. Unmissable. Details bbc.co.uk/proms

• Also at the Proms this week is the Violin Concerto by Grace Williams – a composer not so well known but in the process of rediscovery. A pupil of Vaughan Williams, her most celebrated work is an orchestral set of Sea Sketches that depict the Welsh coast of her childhood but were actually written in Willow Road, Hampstead, where she lived during the Second World War (having taught at Camden Girls’ School). The Concerto is a bit later, 1950. And as the concert includes Holst’s The Planets, it should be a hot ticket – as I suspect will be the Prom on Aug 11 which features music from Stanley Kubrick’s movie classic 2001: a Space Odyssey.

You get Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra whose grand opening flourish signals the creation of the world. And you get the more micro-active music by Ligeti that Kubrick took without asking the composer’s permission, supposedly thinking he was dead. He wasn’t. There were lawsuits. And now that Ligeti is unequivocally dead, this concert comes as a timely tribute in his centenary year (born 1923). As ever, details bbc.co.uk/proms. And every Prom is broadcast live on Radio 3.

• Glyndebourne may not be your thing, but its edgier counterpart, the Grimeborn opera season – is under way at Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, and playing Aug 9-12 is a priceless gem by Leonard Bernstein: his short, chic but emotionally heavyweight Trouble in Tahiti. Written in the early 1950s with a bitter-sweet lyricism that prefigures West Side Story, it’s a musicalised snapshot of an American marriage in crisis: glossy on the outside, crumbling at the core. In some ways it’s confessional – Bernstein was a gay man in a comparably crumbling marriage at the time of writing – and the final duet is a classic of suppressed pain that will lump your throat. Arcolatheatre.com