Ronald Corp, 1951-2025 [Highgate Choral Society]

“YOU can never have too many pianists.” I remember someone telling me when they were organising a crazy concert with eight Steinway grands on the platform. And I wasn’t convinced.

But this is one of those weeks that gives pause for thought as Wigmore Hall positively shoehorns eminent pianists into the premises. On May 17 when the star collaborative pianist James Baillieu appears not once but three times – morning, afternoon and evening – accompanying singers including Jamie Barton, the beyond-exuberant mezzo who came onstage with a giant LGBT flag at the 2018 Last Night of the Proms.

May 21 has a starry keyboard double-booking when Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou pair up for four-hand piano music by Franz Schubert and György Kurtág. May 18 brings the Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich playing one of the towering icons of keyboard repertoire, Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

And May 20 has Angela Hewitt, twice, with an evening concert prefaced by a lunchtime one in which she appears alongside the celebrated Italophile crime-writer Donna Leon. Leon’s books are always based in Venice with a music-loving detective; and she herself is deeply knowledgeable about Italian bel canto repertory – which is why the music for this event is Handel and Rossini.

Details for everything at wigmore-hall.org.uk – and it’s probably enough big-name players to last you into autumn.

But, that said, there’s another: the dazzling young Yunchan Lim at the Albert Hall on May 20 playing the Chopin Concerto with the RPO. Blessed with the looks and following of a Korean boy band (hence the Albert Hall: you couldn’t fit his fans into a smaller venue), Lim is prodigiously gifted and deserves his celebrity in a way that many don’t. royalalberthall.com

• The composer Charles Wood was a relatively minor figure, best-known for writing Anglican church music (Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis settings by the yard) and for teaching bigger names like Vaughan Williams. But he also wrote string quartets, one of them called the Highgate. And you can hear it in Highgate, May 18, as part of the intimate Salon Music series that runs there. Performed by the London Chamber Ensemble. salonmusic.co.uk

• French baroque opera is an acquired taste that some find exquisite, others a long sit. But Rameau’s Pygmalion has the advantage of brevity, compressing the myth of the sculptor who falls in love with his own creation into just one, ravishingly beautiful act. And it plays in the grandeur of Middle Temple Hall, May 20, courtesy of the Early Opera Company under Christian Curnyn. templemusic.org

• Finally, a brief tribute to the conductor/composer/Anglican priest Ronald Corp who very sadly died last week after giving so much for so long to London’s musical life as director of Highgate Choral Society, the London Chorus, and his own New London Orchestra. His concerts, usually at All Hallows Gospel Oak, were always packed out. His recordings of English light music had extraordinary listening reach. And standing testament to it is that fact that his death was noted in the Sun: a publication not much given to celebrating classical conductors.

As it happens, Highgate Choral Society have a concert coming up, May 17, in St Michael’s Highgate, featuring Vaughan Williams’ rhapsodic meditation on the journey of a human soul, Toward the Unknown Region. Ron will doubtless be in everybody’s thoughts. hcschoir.com