Michael Zev Gordon [Claire Shovelton]

THEODORE Adorno’s famous dictum about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz was a provocative statement designed for contradiction. And contradictions abound – with a significant new example this week at the Guildhall School’s Milton Court.

Called A Kind of Haunting, it’s a substantial piece – c.45 minutes – by the composer Michael Zev Gordon with whose music I’ve had powerful encounters through the years. And it’s based on intergenerational memory: the way events of the past are absorbed by those who come later, piecing together old stories with lasting repercussions.

In Gordon’s case, the story concerns his grandfather, a Polish Jew who was taken to a forest and shot by the Nazis in the Second World War. Through Gordon’s childhood this was something rarely talked about, shrouded in silence. But in later life he’s been to Poland to find out what happened. And A Kind of Haunting is the consequence, revisiting the facts in different, over-layered ways – as family memoir, academic study, and poetic memorial.

The premiere, given by the endlessly enterprising, always brilliant Britten Sinfonia with standout soloists like baritone James Newby, is Mar 25. And in my book it’s the event of the week. barbican.org.uk

• Annoyingly the same night, Mar 25, there’s a rival draw at Smith Square in a concert programme based on Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis: the masterpiece he wrote in Reading Gaol for his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Compiled by an aspirational young opera company called Vache Baroque, it packs together readings from Wilde’s devastating prose with music – Bach, Purcell, Brahms – that’s in one way or another a cry from the depths. sinfoniasmithsquare.org.uk

• Comparable in tone is Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, one of the great British masterworks to come out of the 1939-45 conflict and a heartfelt plea for compassion in an era of mass-suffering. Much of Tippett’s music has fallen off the radar since his death, while the settings of African-American spirituals in this piece have fallen foul of identity politics – absurdly, given their majestic power, reverence and beauty. But it’s time for that to change, and hopefully the performance by the LSO and Chorus at the Barbican, Mar 23, will play its part. Pappano conducts. Soloists include the magnificent Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha. barbican.org.uk

• Talking of children, Mar 23 seems to be a prime day for introducing them to music, with special events for young listeners organised by the Age of Enlightenment Orchestra at the Festival Hall (southbankcentre.co.uk), by the LPO in the same venue (ditto), and by Ensemble 360 at the Wigmore Hall (wigmore-hall.org.uk). Fun for all the family etc.

• More seriously (but hey, it might be fun too if you have the mindset) the super-stylish JACK Quartet deliver a whole day of modern music at the Wigmore, Mar 22. Carter, Boulez, Glass & others. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• North Londoners should know that Hampstead Chamber Choir are at Emmanuel Church NW6, Mar 22, singing Bach and James MacMillan: hampsteadchamberchoir.org. Another chamber choir, Voxcetera, sing Brahms’s consoling (ie, minus fire & brimstone) German Requiem at St Michael’s Highgate on the same day: voxcetera.co.uk And the eminent director of music at Hampstead Parish Church, Geoffrey Webber, gives an organ recital there, also Mar 22: hampsteadparishchurch.org