HGO double bill: Amelia al Ballo and Trouble in Tahiti, Nov 2-9

AN unsettling fact of music history is that reputations can’t be guaranteed to last, and names you’d think would live forever sometimes disappear – a notable example being Gian Carlo Menotti.

These days he’s a footnote to greatness, remembered chiefly for his relationship with Samuel Barber (they were lovers from their time as students). But back in the mid-20th century he ranked among the most successful composers of opera and ballet in the world, with a string of hits including the Christmas weepie Amahl and the Night Visitors that made him famous.

An Italian-American, he ran the glittering Spoleto Festival, lived in a stately home in Scotland, moved in dizzy social circles like the Kennedys and Rockefellers. And it all began with a chamber opera called Amelia al Ballo (Amelia Goes to the Ball) that played the New York Met in 1938 when Menotti was in his 20s.

It’s a fluffy comedy that almost no one does now. But the Guildhall School has dug it out for reappraisal, and it plays here on a double-bill with Bernstein’s more enduring Trouble in Tahiti, Nov 2-9.

Guildhall shows are sung, of course, by students but they’re almost always good. Menotti’s music can be creaky, sentimental, but it works. So recommended. gsmd.ac.uk

• This is in fact a busy week for fringe opera in London. Chelsea Opera Group has a concert per­formance of Ambroise Thomas’s rarely-done Hamlet at Cadogan Hall, Nov 1: cadoganhall.com. Regents Opera have a concert performance of Strauss’s ear-assaulting epic Elektra at the Blackheath Halls, also Nov 1: blackheathhalls.com

And Hampstead Garden Opera stage La Sonnambula at Jackson’s Lane, Nov 6–15. A bel canto masterpiece by Bellini, it concerns an ostensibly cheating lover who in fact sleep-walks her way into the wrong bedroom. An unlikely story, but that’s opera for you. hgo.org.uk

• Meanwhile English National Opera is firing on all guns right now with another new show, hot on the heels of the recent Angel’s Bone and Tosca. This time it’s Gluck’s Iphigenie in Tauride, a high-classical tragedy that recounts the Greek myth of a priestess forced to sacrifice her own brother and already wielding the knife when (spoiler alert) fate intervenes.
Contrary to decades of ENO practice, it’s being done in the original French (with English surtitles): a decision connected with the fact that period-performance specialist David Bates has been shipped in to conduct, so things will lean toward what used to be called “authenticity”. Runs Nov 6-14. eno.org

• Shostakovich’s mighty set of 24 Preludes & Fugues, all two-and-a-half hours of it, unfolds at Wigmore Hall, Nov 3, in the hands of Dutch pianist Hannes Minnaar who has made the piece his calling-card: wigmore-hall.org.uk

• Kings Place hosts the London Piano Festival Oct 29-Nov 1, with keyboard artists like Peter Donohoe, Charles Owen, Kathryn Stott, and a lot of four-hand action. kingsplace.co.uk

• And the intriguingly left-field ensemble Figure are at LSO St Luke’s, Nov 4, with a programme that illustrates their promotional tag “Music of the past made present”. Normally a period ensemble, they’re presenting here a programme of four new works related in some way to Bach’s luridly titled cantata My heart swims in blood. Sounds like a case for A&E, but probably fascinating. figureensemble.co.uk