Endelienta Baroque perform at the Handel Hendrix House, 25 Brook Street, Mayfair, on May 6 [Simon King]

LONDON has never done much to celebrate its great composers, and so far as I’m aware the city has but one composer’s house that’s open to the public for visiting. It’s 25 Brook Street in Mayfair, where Handel lived and worked during the mid-18th century. And though it opened as a museum in 2001, the acquisition of the property has been a gradual affair because the ground floor remained commercial premises – which meant you had to enter ignominiously round the back, halfway between a tradesman and a burglar, and climb stairs to get in.

But in the past couple of years it’s undergone a serious renovation. The ground floor has been reclaimed, so you can enter respectably through Handel’s front door (from which he used to sell tickets for his own concerts). And there’s a new programme of house concerts that operate on a confrontingly intimate scale (the rooms aren’t massive) and give you a sense of how it must have been in Handel’s time when the building buzzed with music – much of it rehearsals for forthcoming premieres of the composer’s works.

There are two concerts coming up on May 6, one of them featuring the modestly sized period-performance group Endelienta Baroque. And looking ahead, there’s a weekend residency May 11-13 by members of the English Concert. If you feel squashed in, consider how it would have been in the 1700s when people took up more room. Minus the crinolines and swords, it’s slightly easier. handelhendrix.org/whats-on

• Talking of intimacy, the violinist Leonidas Kavakos – one of today’s true masters – plays all six of Bach’s solo sonatas/partitas (just him, no pianist) over two concerts at Wigmore Hall, May 2 and 3. Think of it as a higher-pitch counterpart to Bach’s solo cello suites: a series of profound musical puzzles, with dazzling highlights like the magisterial Chaconne in the Partita No 2.

• Also at the Wigmore this week is the seriously starry grouping of pianist Igor Levit, violinist Renaud Capucon and cellist Julia Hagen to play the three Brahms Piano Trios on May 4: a classic night. More big stars on May 8 when pianist Imogen Cooper joins tenor Ian Bostridge for songs by Wolf and Schubert. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• And for something to stimulate the brain, May 5 at the Wigmore brings a performance of Ligeti’s fascinating piano suite Ricercata. Maybe best-known for the ethereal radio-frequency-type music used (without asking him first) in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey, Ligeti wrote Ricercata as an exercise in going back to first principles in composition, with the pieces in the suite progressing from the use of just one note to using two notes, three notes, four…and so on. If that sounds academic, it’s actually magical: a work of genius – played here by French pianist Cedric Tiberghien who weaves the Ligeti into a sequence of Beethoven’s keyboard variations on popular songs and dances. The Amy Winehouse hits of their time. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• If you didn’t know, this happens to be Dying Matters Awareness Week, and to mark the occasion there’s a choral concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields, 3.15pm, May 5, that includes sections of a new Requiem by American composer Michael Trotta. Free entry, no tickets. Just turn up.