Emmanuel Despax is at WHB [Luca Sage]

ANYONE’S who’s had the misfortune to visit the fortress of doom that is the new American Embassy in Nine Elms will probably have passed en route from the tube a sign saying “World Heart Beat” and wondered what it meant.

Explaining what it means isn’t easy, because WHB is many things – a music school, recording studio, café and community project among them. But it’s also London’s newest small-scale concert venue: intimate, compact but well-designed with unexpectedly good sound. And if you want an excuse to see inside, there’s one next on June 6, when French pianist-of-the-moment Emmanuel Despax – a formidable talent – plays Liszt in a recital that also serves to launch his latest CD.

Nine Elms may look like a bit of a hike on the Northern line, but it really isn’t. And you can also walk to WHB from Vauxhall – not unpleasantly through landscaped gardens with “curated” water features. Worth exploring. worldheartbeat.org

• Despax aside, there’s a platoon of pianists doing interesting things in London this week. At Wigmore Hall on June 3, Angela Hewitt abandons the glossy black monster of a Fazioli grand on which she’s been playing Bach (irreproachably) for decades, and ventures into the more modest soundworld of a period-style fortepiano for a lunchtime recital of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It’s the first time she’s done this in the UK, so an event that fans will queue for. wigmore-hall.org.uk

Meanwhile, the edgily cerebral Kirill Gerstein is at LSO St Lukes, May 31, with a bunch of musical friends to play an eclectic programme of chamber works. As one of the friends is celebrity composer Thomas Ades, it’s no surprise that there’s some Ades in the mix. lso.co.uk

Maybe more conventionally, the wonderful Boris Giltburg is at the Wigmore, June 4, playing what football commentators would call a game of two halves: Chopin Nocturnes in the first, and pre-Revolutionary Russian rep in the second – which is to say Stravinsky (his ballet Petrushka adapted for piano), Tchaikovsky and Medtner (the late-Romantic who ended up living, and dying, in not so romantic Golders Green). wigmore-hall.org.uk

Talking of Medtner, he’s also on the bill the same evening, June 4, when Dmitri Alexeev gives a recital at Leighton House, Holland Park. Details: lisapeacock.co.uk

• Opera openings this week include a new Barber of Seville at the summer auditorium in the middle of Holland Park. Runs June 4-21: operahollandpark.com

And there’s a new student production of Handel’s Alcina at the Guildhall School, Barbican, June 3-10: gsmd.ac.uk

While for those who like singing but not for three hours at a time, consider the London Song Festival that returns this week to Hinde St Methodist Church, Marylebone. On June 6 the emphasis is comedy, with sidesplitters from Tom Lehrer to Flanders & Swann. And June 7 has songs by Madeleine Dring whose long-neglected work (not least for West End cabarets and revues) is suddenly back on the agenda since her centenary last year. It’s charming, touching, entertaining, a discovery – sung here by star soprano Kate Royal and mezzo Lottie Betts-Dean, with pianist Nigel Foster. londonsongfestival.org