Declan Hickey is at Burgh House [Declan Hickey]

IT’S tempting to think of the guitar as a modern instrument, strummed by soulful Californian songwriters or fiery Spaniards in tight trousers. But it’s been around a long while, and was a standard feature of salon music-making throughout Europe in the early 19th century, when a guitarist would lead a concert party in arrangements of Schubert, Mendelssohn or whoever.

Two hundred years on, the young virtuoso Declan Hickey has made a specialisation of this near-forgotten concert party world. And on March 14 he recreates it at Hampstead’s Burgh House with a group of friends – singer, oboist, violinist, and others – in a format that embraces readings and (ominously) audience participation. Just as you’d have found in some elegant drawing room c.1830.

Hickey himself plays a period guitar, smaller than modern ones, with shorter strings. And having researched all this since he was a student at Cambridge, he does it with an authority and confidence impervious to the kind of caustic humour 19th-century critics sometimes flung at the guitar.

“In the course of our programme”, he says, “we read out things that were written about the instrument back then. And though some are admiring, others are unkind – like the man who described a guitar duet as ‘congregated nasal twang’. That always gets a laugh”. So a fun evening, but be prepared to join in. Details: burghhouse.org.uk

• Opera stagings come and go, but some hang around for decades, and an example is the Royal Opera’s Andrei Serban production of Turandot which first appeared in 1984 and is still going – presumably because its circus-like take on Puccini’s gruesome pantomime pulls audiences. Back for an umpteenth revival, it plays Mar 19-Apr 19. rbo.org.uk

• Two student opera stagings run this week, both of them going back to basics with core Mozart rep. The Royal College of Music has a Figaro, March 17-22, rcm.ac.uk – while the Royal Academy has a Magic Flute, Mar 18-21, ram.ac.uk

• Also this week, the London Handel Festival runs across various venues from Handel’s own parish church of St George’s Hanover Square (where his allegorical oratorio The Triumph of Time and Disillusion plays Mar 19) to the not so Handelian though atmospheric former nightclub Stone Nest (with edgy reimaginings of Handel arias by the likes of full-on avant-garde mezzo Lore Lixenberg, Mar 20). But another choice location is the magically tucked-away Charterhouse, near Smithfield, where there’s a lunchtime programme of baroque chamber music, Mar 20. Details: london-handel-festival.com

• Something else that takes you to interestingly off-piste venues is the City Music Foundation whose series of concerts in livery halls continues Mar 17 with the up-and-coming Kyan Quartet playing Beethoven at Haberdasher’s Hall, West Smithfield: citymusicfoundation.org
And if you’ve ever wanted to see inside the majestically muscular (if folorn) St Stephen’s Rosslyn Hill NW3, the period group Linden Baroque have a programme of music by Telemann and others about the elements in overdrive – storms, floods etc – playing there Mar 16. Should be noisy. lindenbaroque.org

• Finally, the London Soundtrack Festival kicks off at Wigmore Hall, Mar 19, with chamber music by composers (Dario Marianelli, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann…) best-known for their film scores. Cellist Richard Harwood and friends perform. wigmore-hall.org.uk