Guy Johnston [Frances Marshall]

GUY Johnston still gets remembered as the teenage cellist who broke a string in the TV finals of the BBC Young Musician Competition and handled the catastrophe with such impressive sang-froid that he won regardless. But that was a long time ago, in 2000. And since then he’s established an international career, known not only for his playing but for his entrepreneurial instincts.

He likes projects. Last year he took his Stradivari cello back to Cremona where it was made in 1692, for concerts that (belatedly) reunited the instrument with its origins. This year he’s organising something similar around the Walton Cello Concerto, with concerts on Ischia, where the piece was written.

In his spare time he runs a stately chamber music festival at Hatfield House. And for good measure, he commissions new works – with a prominent example coming up at the Barbican where he’s premiering a brand new concerto by composer Joseph Phibbs.

It’s a substantial, five-movement piece designed to test Johnston’s mettle but also to tackle the standard problem with cello concertos, which is to make sure the soloist can be heard against the orchestra. See how that works out here with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jan 16. barbican.org.uk

• The Royal Opera has just been running a magnificently sung but messily staged production of Janacek’s Makropulos Case; and being a piece that doesn’t get done too often, you’d expect not to see it again for a while. But no. Simon Rattle and the LSO are doing Makropulos at the Barbican, Jan 13 & 16, with a cast including Marlis Petersen as the 300yr-old vamp whose quest for immortality triggers a complicated plot: half-comedy, half-tragedy. It’s a concert performance without sets or action, so you might want to read the synopsis beforehand. But after the overload of the ROH show, a straightforward sing will probably be a relief. barbican.org.uk

• The occasional concert series at JW3 in Finchley Road continues Jan 15 with the Fibonacci Quartet, enlarged by a couple of friends for a programme of sextets by Strauss, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. jw3.org.uk

Meanwhile, the 2026 season at Conway Hall starts Jan 11 with the Carducci Quartet and pianist Simon Callaghan playing Beethoven, Schumann, and a piece by the 20th-century British composer Rebecca Clarke whose haunting music will be the next great discovery of your life if you don’t know it already. conwayhall.org.uk

• Almost everything else of note this week happens at Wigmore Hall where baritone Roderick Williams takes a non-Schubertian “Winter Journey” through English song with pianist Christopher Glynn, Jan 9; violinist Fenella Humphreys plays Fauré and Mozart, Jan 10; and countertenor Iestyn Davies sings Britten & Poulenc with harpist Oliver Wass, Jan 13. wigmore-hall.org.uk
But there’s also star guitarist Sean Shibe playing Bach at the Purcell Room, Jan 10: southbankcentre.co.uk – and venturing off the beaten track, that most radiantly august of pianists Dame Imogen Cooper is at the National Liberal Club, Jan 9, playing what she’s best known for, Schubert. Catch her while you can: she’s just announced the coming season as her last before retiring from performance and, in her mid-70s, finding out what it might be to lead a normal life. kettnerconcerts.co.uk