St George’s, Hanover Square, London
Jonathan Cohen and his crack baroque ensemble Arcangelo seized upon the colourful pastoral with relish, lighting up Handel’s own parish church

This year’s London Handel festival got off to a rousing start with new artistic adviser Jonathan Cohen at the helm of Arcangelo, the crack baroque ensemble he founded back in 2010. On the bill was the colourful pastoral L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, in which wit and jollity look set to gain the upper hand before Handel decides to put a dampener on things by insisting on moderation in everything.

Faced with a shortage of Italian singers in 1740, the composer went full English, laying aside ideas for Messiah “to please the Town with something of a gayer Turn.” His librettist, James Harris, interwove Milton’s poem L’Allegro (The Happy Man) with the contrasting Il Penseroso (The Melancholy Man), before adding a codicil at the composer’s request in the form of Il Moderato (The Moderate Man). The result, which ends with a paraphrase on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, may feel a bit of a mashup, but it provided Handel with irresistible opportunities for turning vivid imagery into equally vivid music. Remarkably, he knocked the whole thing out in just 14 days.

Idit Arad calls for better protection for music students as London college admits failing in its duty of care to her

It should have been the start of a great career in classical music for Idit Arad. Everything was lining up for the talented 18-year-old opera singer. She had arrived in London from Israel in 1987, the proud winner of a sought-after scholarship to train at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. But instead of building the foundations of a successful future, she was singled out by a tutor 20 years her senior for a long period of obsessive attention and abuse.

Paul Roberts pursued her from their first lesson, Arad says, inviting her for coffee and then for a dinner to discuss her talent, before sending a stream of explicit letters, calling her a “witch” and urging her into sexual intimacy. Senior leadership, it is now admitted, knew of their involvement and yet failed to discipline Roberts.

Written off in her youth, the unstoppable Belize-born musician has overcome indifference, mockery and abuse to become one of Britain’s most acclaimed composers. You have to hang onto your own worth, she says

For at least half her life, the Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen, appointed last year to the title of Master of the King’s Music, has steered herself through a web of invisible rules. Classical composers, dead or alive, were male and white. Their Black and female counterparts were derided or ignored, excised from history. Then, slowly but definitively, things changed, and the institutions that used to give her the cold shoulder started to open up to the music they had dismissed. “People always want to put labels on things, on people,” Wallen says, without rancour. “Let them. You have to hang on to your own worth, see what needs doing. I was written off young, but then found a way through. There’s still so much work to be done.”

Wallen’s musical range is ambitious, eclectic, often immediately appealing and expressive. Her huge catalogue includes works for ballet, brass bands, orchestras, choirs, solo singers, duos, pianists, chamber ensembles; her 22 operas make her almost as prolific as Verdi and nearly twice as productive as Puccini. She was the first Black woman to have music performed in the Proms, in 1998. Now among the most performed of living composers, she can’t quite remember how many world premieres she has in the next few weeks (after a recount, she decides it’s five), including two on the same night in different venues. She also has a new album out later this month: Errollyn Wallen Orchestral Works, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra. By any measure this is an achievement.