Sheku and Isata Kanneh Mason [James Hole]

YOU know the year is moving on to better things when the summer opera companies get under way. Glyndebourne is up and running, Grange Park nearly there. And London’s own Opera Holland Park starts next week with a new production of Puccini’s Tosca that plays May 28-June 22.

OHP doesn’t usually deliver big names, but this Tosca stars the pretty big Amanda Echalaz in the title role. And given the limited staging possibilities of the Holland Park venue, it will be interesting to see how they tackle her leap of death in the closing scene: always a challenge, with unintentionally comic possibilities that you really don’t want to explore as the curtain falls.

Otherwise, the OHP season this year proceeds with a Barber of Seville in early June, and includes Puccini’s not so often seen early opera Edgar, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard, and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci paired not with the piece to which it is near-umbilically tied (Cavalleria Rusticana) but with the wild card that is Wolf-Ferrari’s Segreto di Susanna.

There’s also a lot packaged around the OHP season this year, with performances by the Royal Ballet School, song recitals, and an Open Day on June 2 that gives you an opportunity to tour backstage, play with costumes and try your hand at conducting – all free, though you need to book. Details: operahollandpark.com

• With the start of summer comes the end of the concert seasons, which seems to get ever earlier. On May 24 the BBC Symphony’s 23/24 season winds up with an all-English programme at the Barbican that features Vaughan Williams’ mighty Sea Symphony and a Britten rarity: the Double Concerto he wrote at the tender age of 18 but then abandoned – leaving it in a bottom drawer for the composer Colin Matthews to find and “realise” decades later. barbican.org.uk

• The Kanneh-Mason family, that head-turning collective of musicians born under the same roof, is a performing phenomenon of modern times. And its two sibling superstars, cellist Sheku and pianist Isata, are in concert together at the Barbican, May 28, playing a conveyor-belt of sonatas by Fauré, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin. barbican.org.uk
But another just as interesting group, related through marriage if not birth, is the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for which I personally carry a torch. I think they’re outstanding, with a curiosity about repertoire that’s infectious. And on May 25 at Wigmore Hall they play Schoenberg’s uber-intense Verklarte Nacht: an early 20th century expressionist masterpiece about a relationship threatened but then healed by admissions of infidelity. In 1902 it was shocking. These days it’s just gripping: a miniature drama told by music. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• Only last week the Royal Opera House, with some help from King Charles, staged a grand farewell to Antonio Pappano as he bows out after 22 years in charge of the music there. But he hasn’t quite gone yet. And still indispensably part of the fabric of the place, he conducts the revived production of Andrea Chenier playing May 30-June 11, with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role (so long as Kaufmann doesn’t cancel: a high risk these days). roh.org.uk