Louise Alder sings Wolf’s lieder at Wigmore Hall [Gerard Collett]

GOING to operas based on Shakespeare, you should never assume that too much of the original story will survive. Composers intervene. And a case in point is Bellini whose I Capuleti e I Montecchi (The Capulets and Montagues) plays Hackney Empire, Feb 22, in a new English Touring Opera production.

Loosely hacked from Romeo and Juliet, things get lost in translation; and at the end, Romeo manages to stay alive long enough for a farewell duet – something Shakespeare never thought of. But then, opera always writes its own rules.

In Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark doesn’t die at all. And when someone gets around to Donald Trump: the Opera (as they will), he’ll probably be turned into a statesman of sophistication and intelligence who makes the world a better place. Bellini’s recreative mischief is comparatively modest. hackneyempire.co.uk

• In fact, the right composer for a Trump opera might just be Jonathan Dove, whose record for comic writing is good, and whose adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park plays in a student show at the Guildhall School, Feb 24-Mar 3. Timed for Austen’s 250th anniversary. gsmd.ac.uk

Mauro Peter

• Germanic culture, buttoned-up and chilly as it sometimes is, has always fantasised about the warmth and freedom of the south. And it’s a factor behind Hugo Wolf’s Italian Lieder Book: a sprawling collection of songs about Italian street-life – charming, funny, full of gossip, sunshine and vitality – turned into German verse and set by one of the Austrian masters of vocal writing. You can hear the whole thing in a Wigmore Hall lunchtime recital, Feb 21, sung by Louise Alder and Mauro Peter with pianist Joseph Middleton. And if you can’t be there, it broadcasts live on the Wigmore website where it stays for a while – with free access: a gift worth seizing. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• I never understand how the Oxford Philharmonic manages to book such a conveyor-belt of super-star soloists, but it does. Impressively. And on Feb 24 it comes to the Barbican with no less than Martha Argerich for Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto. Marios Papadopoulos conducts. barbican.org.uk

• Electronic music doesn’t pull the crowds in classical performance as it once did, and nostalgia may rule when the Barbican devotes one of its Total Immersion days to “symphonic electronics”, Feb 23. With the BBCSO and BBC Singers, it inevitably features some megalomaniac Stockhausen (a piece he described as “composing the orbits of 24 moons or 24 planets”) but also brings in latterday practitioners still twiddling knobs and generating cosmic noise. Sonic agendas of the 70s reborn. barbican.org.uk

• Saved from extinction, the BBC Singers have never been busier than they seem to be right now; and they turn up at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Feb 21, for a performance of Eric Whitacre’s largescale choral work about love, loss and death The Sacred Veil. stmartin-in-the-fields.org

• Finally, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment holds an open rehearsal (of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Eroica Symphony) on Feb 25 at Acland Burghley School, Tufnell Park, where the OAE is productively embedded. Noted conductor Maxim Emelyanychev takes charge. It’s free-access. But you’ll need to book, and there’s a run on tickets. oae.co.uk