Mezzo soprano Fleur Baron performs in Spring Snow: A Kabuki Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall on October 11 [Victoria Cadisch]

A NIGHT at English National Opera may not come with the expensive, international star singers Covent Garden gives you (at a price), but it has always offered more adventure, challenge, and the thrill of the unknown than Covent Garden dares. Hence Angel’s Bone, the sharp-edged new piece playing ENO, Oct 16-31.

Written by Shanghai-born but New York-based composer Du Yun – little known here but a lauded figure in America who cuts across traditions, cultures, genres – it’s a dark parable about angels who fall to earth and find themselves imprisoned, sexually trafficked, and exploited for commercial gain. Their wings clipped, literally.

Described by the New York Times as a “musical cocktail of Renaissance polyphony, electronica, modernism, punk rock and cabaret” (which sounds comprehensive), it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 after ecstatic reviews for its American premiere. And its arrival on this side of the Atlantic should be a major event that gives poor, impoverished and now itinerant ENO a shot in the arm as the company shuffles between London and Manchester, trying to make a go of things in difficult circumstances. eno.org

• Meanwhile, the comparably valiant English Touring Opera check into Hackney Empire, Oct 16 & 19, with a new staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice: one of the composer’s so-called “reform” works that helped shift opera away from Baroque complexity toward the “noble simplicity” of Classicism – although in this show there’s some modern musical updating that may put some of the complexity back.

In between, on Oct 17, ETO have more stories of love and loss with a double-bill of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and a new work by Elena Langer (someone with a dazzling gift for music-theatre) based on the ancient legend of Ariadne (dumped by Theseus and not happy about it). englishtouringopera.org.uk

• At Wigmore Hall the big event, repeated Oct 15 & 16, is a recital by the young superstar pianist Yunchan Lim. But since it’s sold out (as are his return visits in December and March!), console yourself with other possibilities – including pianist Bertrand Chamayou joining violinist Vilda Frang in Bartók and Kurtág, Oct 9, and the period ensemble Solomon’s Knot in Bach’s B Minor Mass, Oct 10.

For those with memories, baritone Willard White marks his 80th birthday with a lunchtime recital at the Wigmore, also Oct 9. The eminent authority on German song Richard Stokes launches his latest book with a lunchtime words & music job, Oct 10. And there’s a left-field event, Oct 11, Spring Snow: A Kabuki Winterreise that connects Schubert’s song cycle with Japanese Kabuki theatre (don’t ask me how, but I feel the need to know). wigmore-hall.org.uk

• Think of Bach cantatas and you think of something to be sung in church. But he wrote secular ones too. And an example is his Coffee Cantata: a miniature comic opera about addiction to caffeine, written for performance in a Leipzig Kaffeehaus.

18th-century Germans weren’t too sure that coffee was a good idea but nonetheless drank it in quantities. Given the price of a flat white these days, they’d be bankrupt. But their ghosts will flock to Hampstead’s Heath St Baptist Church, Oct 11, where the up-for-it period group Baroquestock promise to recreate Bach’s Kaffeehaus, complete with cakes and pastries, while his knockabout cantata plays. Might just be fun, if fattening. baroquestock.com