Stephen Hough in concert at Wigmore Hall on January 2. PHOTO: Sim Canetty-Clarke

IT’S an annoying fact of life that talent isn’t evenly distributed: some people seem to have too much of it. And an especially annoying case is Stephen Hough (as of last year, Sir Stephen) who ranks as one of the most striking polymaths around. He paints, writes and composes… and he isn’t a bad pianist either, which is why he stars at Wigmore Hall on Monday January 2 in a concert that features him at the keyboard playing nothing but his own music. Though not by himself.

The music is a sequence of song cycles that reflect the intellectual preoccupations of his life – which tend to home in on God, love and sexuality. Apart from the piano, Hough is famous as a gay man who is also (and devoutly) Roman Catholic. And the songs that feature in this Wigmore evening have a lot to do with that conundrum, as it often is.

There are settings of the libertine Oscar Wilde and the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, each of whom was in his manner gay and Catholic (in the case of Wilde, after a life-long struggle with the faith). But there are also setting of Rilke, Housman, some of the black poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Lady Antonia Fraser, and Hough himself – a collection you could fairly call diverse.

And to perform these songs is an outstanding collection of singers, including tenor Nicky Spence and baritone James Newby, along with a second pianist, Alistair Hogarth, for one of the cycles that requires four hands at the keyboard.

It promises to be a truly special evening, and an unmissable start to a new year of music-making at the Wigmore. Be there. wigmore-hall.org.uk

• With most of the other London halls in the deep sleep that prevails after Christmas, it’s the Wigmore that holds all the cards just now, with more concerts there on December 30 (the Albion Quartet playing Haydn, Shostakovich, and the little-known but exquisite early quartet by William Walton) and December 31 (the Dunedin Consort in Bach cantatas).

But by January 4, things kick in at the Barbican when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain sweep in with their annual New Year event. It’s a high-impact programme of Britten’s Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, the tone poem whose opening bars will be forever associated with their use in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s additionally a new piece by one of Britain’s most exciting composers of the moment, Anna Clyne, whose RIFT is described as a “restless visceral landscape propelling us from darkness to light”. And one thing you can guarantee about all this is that the youthful players of the NYO will give the music every­thing they’ve got. The orchestra may only come together inter­mittently, a few times a year for intensive residences in prepara­tion for a handful of concerts, but it has energy, ambition and enthusiasm to spare. So expect this performance to knock you sideways. barbican.org.uk