Pianist Stephen Hough gives a talk at Barnsbury Book Festival

WHEN the Second World War was over, there was understandably a sense that British culture needed to look forward as opposed to looking back – to a new era and fresh start. But the shadow of war was hard for some creative artists to ignore. And for Benjamin Britten, a pacifist, the all too recent horrors fed into his 1946 opera The Rape of Lucretia, which tells a disturbing tale of sexual violence committed in the context of soldiers brutalised by experience of combat.

It’s a dark piece, and an early score that doesn’t rank among his best. But almost nothing in the Britten catalogue fails to be touched by genius, and Lucretia has a ritualised menace that dissolves into extraordinary tenderness and beauty – as you’ll find if you go to Hampstead Garden Opera’s new production which plays at Jackson’s Lane, N6, Apr 18-26. As ever, HGO presents young singers on the threshold of careers, with emerging directors and a can-do energy about its shows. hgo.org.uk

• AN opera you’ll never have heard of before is Twice a Kiss: a comic romp by a composer, Peter Tranchell, who taught at Cambridge through the 1950s-80s and left behind a fair output of music that lay forgotten until a group of enthusiasts (largely his former students) started digging it out. With a vengeance.

Dating from the 1960s, Twice a Kiss gets a concert performance at St Paul’s Knightsbridge, Apr 18, with a bizarrely star-encrusted cast of singers like Sophie Bevan, Christopher Purves and James Gilchrist under rising conductor Michael Papadopoulos. And the evening comes packaged with Tranchell’s keyboard music played by comparably starry pianist Piers Lane. How the Tranchellites pulled this together I don’t know, but it’s impressive. Details: peter-tranchell.uk

• Crouch End Festival Chorus have form for commissioning new works, and there’s one at Cadogan Hall, Apr 19, written by the edgy young composer Robin Haigh. Called Tearfloods, it responds to a Studio Ghibli story of a journey on underground lake formed by every tear that was ever shed. More cheerfully, it plays alongside that robust standard of choral repertory Carmina Burana. cefc.org.uk

• Another heavy-hitting choral standard comes to the Barbican, Apr 19 & 20, when the LSO and Chorus perform Elgar’s perfumed fantasy of death Dream of Gerontius. Antonio Pappano conducts. And a bonus is the mezzo soloist Emily D’Angelo who has to be one of the most thrilling younger voices on the world circuit. barbican.org.uk

• Talking of heavy hits, Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony – a blowsy, brutal, kitsch (but with the power to blow your socks off) love-letter to life – plays at the Festival Hall, Apr 23. Vasily Petrenko conducts the RPO. Steven Osborne is the piano soloist. And though it also has the power to irritate, if you surrender to the joy of Messiaen’s complicated innocence you’ll dance your way home afterwards. southbankcentre.co.uk

• As anyone will tell you about Stephen Hough, he isn’t only one of the world’s leading pianists, he’s a polymath: a thinker, writer, spiritual counsellor and raconteur. And he’ll be doing some at least of all this at the brand new Barnsbury Book Festival on Apr 17 when he talks – with gleeful indiscretion you can only hope – about his life, loves, and recent autobiography Enough. Venue: St Andrew’s Thornhill Square, N1. Details: barnsburybookfestival.org