Ian Bostridge is at JW3 [Simon Fowler]

MUSIC lives for ever, with a bit of help from those who make it; but the makers come and go. And so it was that, back in 2020, the very eminent Endellion String Quartet decided to put down their bows after 42 years of playing together. For some of them retirement beckoned. But for their cellist David Waterman it brought the chance of something else: curating a new concert series at JW3, the Jewish cultural centre in Finchley Road, with ambitions to platform world-class artists and function like a north London satellite of Wigmore Hall.

Admittedly the auditorium at JW3 doesn’t have the Wigmore’s resonance: it’s dry. But, as he says, “the sound is clear, you hear everything. And with just 220 seats you feel part of the performance – which is why audiences like it, and are very engaged. Since we started, I don’t think we’ve had a single mobile phone go off!”

So let’s hope that unblemished record continues on October 10 when the dizzily distinguished tenor Ian Bostridge appears for a song recital with pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen.

Bostridge is an artist who divides opinion: for some, the sound is too wiry, the manner too histrionic. But he remains one of the most distinctive and emotionally charged singers around. And having seen him earlier this year give a gut-wrenching performance at the Aldeburgh Festival, I can testify that he’s on fine form – which means his JW3 programme of Schubert and Fauré should be an experience. jw3.org.uk

• You may have noticed that the job of Master of the King’s Music has just changed hands, passing from Judith Weir to Errollyn Wallen. So it’s a good moment to be reminded of how Weir’s music sounds; and an opportunity comes on October 5 when English Touring Opera bring her compactly mysterious Blond Eckbert to Hackney Empire. Written in the 1990s, it’s a dark German Romantic fairy-tale of incest, murder and insanity, all questions with no answers. ETO give it the feel of Alfred Hitchcock. And it’s all the more disturbing for the quiet understatement of Weir’s music. hackneyempire.co.uk

• The week’s other operatic event is Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, opening at the Royal Opera on October 10. A piece about American mid-20th century suburban life and the anxieties that hide behind the surface gloss and optimism, it began as an exquisite miniature called Trouble in Tahiti but was then expanded into a larger work that takes the story forward in time, revealing how a dysfunctional marriage has resulted in a dysfunctional family. Incorporating Bernstein’s own domestic traumas, it plays like autobiography. Directed here by Oliver Mears, and conducted by Nicholas Chalmers (who also happens to be director of music at St Jude’s Hampstead Garden Suburb). A hot ticket. Runs to Oct 24. rbo.org.uk

• The annual London Piano Festival runs over two days, October 4-5, at Kings Place, opening with a Mozart gala that pairs the Carducci Quartet with festival founders Charles Owen and Katia Apekisheva. But the most interesting event is on Oct 5 when classical pianist Kit Armstrong and jazz pianist Michael Wollny play head to head in a night of keyboard improvisation. kingsplace.co.uk