Gustav Dudamel is at the Barbican [Danny Clinch for LA Phil]

NEW year, fresh start and all that. And to welcome 2025 the London concert halls have copious quantities of fresh young talent, starting with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra who play Britten’s Young Person’s Guide and Holst’s The Planets at the Barbican, Jan 14, alongside a recent song cycle by Ian Venables: a composer whose writing is passionate, accessible, and generally worth making an effort to hear. barbican.org.uk

By bizarre coincidence, the German National Youth Orchestra is at Cadogan Hall the following night, Jan 15, with almost the same programme: Young Person’s Guide and The Planets, alongside Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. cadoganhall.com

And for good measure, Venezuela’s famously exuberant Simón Bolívar Orchestra – which used to be a “youth” orchestra but dropped that label when the players started looking too adult – is at the Barbican for two nights, Jan 15 & 16, with its celebrated conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

I remember a time when Dudamel himself counted as young: in fact I was there in 2000 when he won the competition that propelled him onto the world stage. Since then, he’s been running the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is about to take on the New York Phil; so you could say he’s done good. But his loyalty to the Bolivar band, where he learnt his craft back in the 1990s, still holds. For their London tour they bring you Mahler’s 3rd Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s 4th. Expect big emotion. barbican.org.uk

We haven’t quite left the world of youth, though, because the Guildhall School of Music feeds the cream of its vocal students into a free-access masterclass with baritone Gerald Finley, Jan 14, at its own Milton Court hall: gmsd.ac.uk

And the dazzling 24-year-old Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene is at Wigmore Hall, lunchtime Jan 12, playing appropriately Nordic repertoire: Grieg and Sibelius. It’s part of what seems to be a Northern Lights theme running at the Wigmore that day, with Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes there in the evening playing Greig and Geirr Tveitt – the latter barely known outside the Scandi-countries, partly because of a house fire in the 1970s that destroyed most of his life’s work, but a figure who deserves exploration. wigmore-hall.org.uk

As for new music, the big event this week is the world premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s Guitar Concerto, Jan 12, at the Barbican. Played by the LSO under Simon Rattle, it’s written not for a classical guitarist but a jazz one: the legendary John Scofield. And so specifically is it a piece for his kind of music-making, it carries the title “Sco”. Sharing the programme are earlier English works by Tippett and Vaughan Williams. barbican.org.uk

• Other things to note this week include a revival of the Royal Opera’s Jenufa: a stark, abstracted staging by Claus Guth last seen in 2021 and playing Jan 15 to Feb 1 with Karita Mattila as the child-killing stepmother. Gripping stuff. rbo.org.uk

Equally unmissable is a performance at Inner Temple Hall of Handel’s oratorio Solomon, given by the Gabrieli Consort with choice soloists including Anna Dennis as the Queen of Sheba (whose Arrival generates the best-known music in the score). Jan 16. templemusic.org