Pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi plays Medtner and Beethoven at St Mary-le-Strand

ALONGSIDE roses and expensive restaurants, concerts are now firmly fixed among the tropes of Valentine’s Day – and there are plenty this week with candlelight and dreamily romantic programmes that you might want to avoid. But if you must, the RPO has a Feb 14 opera gala at Cadogan Hall that will be predictably fuelled by love duets about heaving hearts and tiny hands (cadoganhall.com). And more discerningly, there’s a Feb 14 recital at Wigmore Hall in which the soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist Joseph Middleton perform songs by music history’s most celebrated loving couple Robert and Clara Schumann (wigmore-hall.org.uk).
That the poor Schumanns were doomed – by Robert’s insanity and Clara’s self-punishing efforts to pursue a career while raising coachloads of children – is neither here nor there. We remember them for their determination to marry in the face of fierce parental opposition. And the songs that sprang from that frustrated loving energy remain among the greatest of all time. They don’t need candles.

• Otherwise, it’s a week when Japanese artistry takes centre-stage. On Feb 9 at the Barbican the BBCSO programme Takemitsu’s Requiem for String Orchestra with the British premiere of a Violin Concerto by the not so well-known Toshio Hosokawa (barbican.org.uk). And the same night, Feb 9, at St Mary-le-Strand, the pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi plays Medtner and Beethoven (stmarylestrand.com).

Takenouchi is particularly interesting as a Japanese musician who is based in England and makes a speciality of minor English composers like Sterndale Bennett and Hubert Parry. Not so long ago he featured on a TV programme in which Prince Charles (as he then was) extolled the virtues of Parry, standing beside Takenouchi in mid-performance and saying, repeatedly: “Remarkable!” Which wasn’t actually so far from the truth. Go hear Takenouchi’s Medtner and you may feel the same.

• The always-remarkable Nash Ensemble have been running a Wigmore Hall series of chamber music from what used to be called Czechoslovakia; and it goes into overdrive this weekend with two concerts on Feb 10 and a third on Feb 11. Works by Smetana, Martinu, Dvorak…and Dvorak’s pupil/son-in-law Josef Suk (wigmore-hall.org.uk)

• When Neville Marriner set up the Academy of St Martin’s back in the 1950s, it was initially to play Italian baroque composers he called “ice cream merchants” because their names, although obscure, suggested edible delight. I don’t think he got round to pasta merchants but he’d have been intrigued to see another baroque-leaning group, La Serenissima, at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Feb 9, playing music by one Pietro Gnocchi (who sounds good with pesto sauce) along with some more staple-diet Vivaldi. Altogether tasty. stmartin-in-the-fields.org

• The polymath director/doctor/writer and presiding genius of Camden Town society Jonathan Miller has been dead for some years now, but his work lives on – not least, his deathless ENO staging of Rossini’s Barber of Seville which is back at the Coliseum for an umpteenth revival, Feb 12-29. Clever, sharp, engaging, genuinely funny, it has always been a joy; and you can only hope that, this time round, it hasn’t been affected by the pall of misery and anguish hanging over ENO right now as the company faces an uncertain future and its singers/players threaten strikes. eno.org