The Pavel Haas String Quartet perform at Wigmore Hall on Nov 24

NEVER be dismissive about student shows – especially not here in London, where three of the world’s top-ranking conservatoires attract the cream of the world’s talent and showcase it in circumstances so privileged they pass for professional.

The Royal Academy of Music, for example, has an exquisite newish theatre where I’ve seen some truly wonderful things in the past year or so, including a production of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along that could have given any West End counterpart a run for its money. So I’m seriously looking forward to the new staging of Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress that opens there on Nov 22 (incidentally the feast of St Cecilia, patron saint of music).

Some people find The Rake emotionally cold, with its over-erudite libretto by WH Auden and a brothel scene that’s not exactly steamy. But there’s an endearing pathos in its story of exploited innocence; not many operas boast a bearded lady as a character; and the concluding scene in Bedlam has the most beautiful music Stravinsky ever composed. What’s more, this RAM production is conducted by the celebrated Trevor Pinnock, venturing out from his home-territory of period performance into a score that dates from 1951 – although it does imitate the style of music from earlier centuries, so I daresay he’ll cope. Running until Nov 25. Tickets: ram.ac.uk

By way of rivalry, the Royal College of Music in South Kensington also have a production opening next week: the blissful craziness of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld which runs Nov 21-26. If you don’t know the piece, it parodies the Greek myth in which Orpheus attempts to rescue his wife from death – except in this case the not so happy couple would prefer to leave things be, and the rescue is decidedly half-hearted. Details: rcm.ac.uk

• One of the Britain’s leading living composers, Anna Clyne, happens to have been born in Camden; and it’s to Camden that she brings the UK premiere of a new work for cello and orchestra called DANCE, playing at Cecil Sharp House, Nov 18. Clyne’s work tends to be spectacular and strong. And this piece, based on a poem by the Persian mystic Rumi, is performed by the ensemble Arch Sinfonia – alongside music by Sibelius and Beethoven. archsinfonia.co.uk

• The composer Pavel Haas perished in Auschwitz in 1944. But his name lives on in the body of work that he created before the Nazis took him, and in the celebrated Pavel Haas String Quartet who are at Wigmore Hall on Nov 24 to play his 2nd quartet – an autobiographical score that recalls the joy of childhood holidays in the Moravian Highlands and has an inescapable poignancy with the knowledge of what came later. Paired with works by Prokofiev and Haydn, it plays not just to the audience physically present but on the Hall’s livestream. Details: wigmore-hall.org.uk

• The Rachmaninoff Music Academy is a north London-based institution for very young but very gifted children; and they have a showcase concert with the associated Camerata Tchaikovsky under its director Yuri Zhislin at St Mark’s Hamilton Terrace on Nov 19. Be amazed by what these kids can do. rachmaninoffmusicacademy.com