Mad Song ensemble perform at High Barnet Chamber Music Festival [madsong.co.uk]

EVERY so often something surfaces in the concert schedules that’s niche and crazy but the kind of thing you cancel all engagements for. And an example comes to Wigmore Hall on June 5 when at 10pm (past all our bedtimes I know, but it’s best heard at dead of night) there’s a performance by London Voices of Stockhausen’s Stimmung.

I appreciate that the very name Stockhausen can chill the hearts of music-lovers: he’s challenging. And it’s fair to say he was mad: he claimed, after all, to have been born not on earth but on the planet Sirius. But his work has a hallucinatory (aka unearthly) beauty. And nothing is more beautiful than Stimmung (the word means “pitch”) which requires amplified voices to project the overtones of a single note – B flat as it happens – for roughly an hour.

Theoretically about tuning into the natural resonance of the universe, it’s like listening to a vacuum cleaner and getting high on the experience – though, for the sake of variety, Stockhausen throws in incantations on the names of ancient gods, plus a spot of his own erotic poetry that would be embarrassing (there’s a riff on the penis as the “soul of man”) but for the fact that it’s in German and hard to follow.

Have I sold it to you? Maybe not. But if you’re curious for a taste of 1960s, spaced-out avant-gardism – think bean bags, lava lamps and free love – this is seminal. And worth a late night. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• Lingering in the zone of 60s avant-gardism, you might also enjoy Peter Maxwell Davies’ infamous Eight Songs for a Mad King which the Manchester Collective brings to Kings Place, June 6. Raucous, rude and shocking even now, it’s an iconic score you have to hear once, if only to know once was enough. kingsplace.co.uk

• Speaking of insanity, there’s a group called Mad Song (in honour of the Maxwell Davies piece) who star at High Barnet Chamber Music Festival, which happens to be run by their founder Joshua Balance. With venues in striking distance of the tube station, it mixes new music with old in adventurous ways. This year there are four main concerts, all commendable, starting June 6 and spaced across the month. Explore what’s on at hbcmf.co.uk

• Also getting under way is Classical Pride, the annual reminder that there’s more to LGBT music than Freddie Mercury and Dusty Springfield. On the programme this year is Britten, Tchaikovsky, Poulenc, Jennifer Higdon. And it runs June 10-14, starting with a violin/piano recital at Kings Place and ending with the LSO at the Barbican in music by Michael Tilson Thomas, Samuel Barber and a composer whose work was barely known until a recent, seismic rediscovery, Henriette Bosmans (the UK premiere of her 2nd cello concerto). In between comes a “baroque ball” at St James’s Palace that boasts countertenor Anthony Roth Costello, tenor Nicky Spence, and sounds magnificently camp. Details: classicalpride.uk

• With fewer sequins, Simon Rattle conducts the Age of Enlightenment Orchestra in an all-Berlioz programme at the Festival Hall, June 10: southbankcentre.co.uk – Antonio Pappano conducts the LSO in Elgar/Mahler at the Barbican, June 11: barbican.org.uk – and Marios Papadopoulos brings his Oxford Philharmonic to Cadogan Hall, June 8, for an all-Beethoven programme: cadoganhall.com