Blue is at the ENO [Greg Funnell]

THE themes of family conflict, love and duty aren’t exactly unfamiliar visitors to opera – but they’re onstage with a vengeance this week as three shows that delve into that territory open side by side in London.

Easily the most important is Innocence, a dark new work by one of the world’s leading living composers Kaija Saariaho. Playing at the Royal Opera House and featuring the remarkable French soprano Sandrine Piau, it’s set in a downbeat Finnish wedding (being herself Finnish, Saariaho knows about such things) at which traumatic memories of past events emerge.

The piece has already been aired in France and Finland and attracted serious attention, so this UK premiere is something not to miss. Runs Apr 17-May 4. roh.org.uk

Also at the Royal Opera, in its smaller Linbury Theatre, is the 18th-century take on family/love/duty that is Handel’s little-known Arminio. One for collectors, it runs Apr 20-May 6. roh.org.uk

And finally, there’s a new piece at English National Opera called Blue, by Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori. Based around an African-American family where the father is a policeman and the son a political activist, it explores issues of race and loyalty in an eclectic score that crosses into jazz, gospel and Broadway musical-theatre lyricism. Booking: eno.org

• Eastern Europe is proving to be fertile ground for the rediscovery of “lost” female composers, and one of the most interesting recent finds has been Vitezslava Kapralova: a Czech composer/conductor who died in 1940 at the age of 25 but packed a lot into her short life (details of which appear, if you’re interested, in Simon Mawer’s novel The Glass Room). Her output includes a set of Preludes for piano. And you can hear some of them in a recital by Sam Haywood, Apr 14, as part of the new keyboard series at St Mary-le-Strand by the Aldwych. stmarylestrand.com

Meanwhile, if Kapralova rouses your curiosity, consider her Polish contemporary Grazyna Bacewicz whose music is gradually becoming more of a fixture these days on concert platforms. On Apr 15 her Concerto for Orchestra plays at the Barbican alongside Bartok’s better known work of the same name. Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC SO. barbican.org.uk

• This year marks 300 years since the death, in 1723, of England’s most celebrated architect, Sir Christopher Wren. And among the commemorations is a concert series at St Stephen Walbrook by the Mansion House: the first of the 52 churches he was commissioned to build after the Great Fire of London, and in some ways a blueprint for the later masterpiece that would be St Paul’s Cathedral.

Organised by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, this concert series features music by composers who were Wren’s contemporaries – starting Apr 20 with Purcell, continuing Apr 21 with Vivaldi, and then Apr 22 with a popular baroque medley of Bach, Handel and Pachalbel. It was all happening back then… Details: ststephenwalbrook.net

• Finally, some more baroque: a Handel Messiah at St Peter’s, Belsize Park, Belsize Square, on Apr 15, given in aid of cancer charities by the locally based Belsize Baroque ensemble. stpeterbelsizepark.org.uk