April and May promise to be good months on New York’s classical music scene, and I’ll give you my sense of the highlights — nonoperatic divisions. Please bear in mind that I’m going on what I take to be merit, not hype. It seems like hype is playing an ever-greater role in classical music — yuck.

Let’s start in Carnegie Hall, big cheese that it is. On April 1, Joshua Bell will not only play his violin, he will lead the famed Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. On the program will be Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” which you may recognize. Mr. Bell is a hyped musician, but also a very good one.

On April 12, another good musician — less hyped — will play a piano recital. That will be Richard Goode, and he will play music in which he is normally superb, including Mozart and Debussy. On April 18, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila will give a recital — and she will sing America’s own “Hermit Songs,” by Samuel Barber. Should be interesting, and probably good.

If Joshua Bell can “play-conduct,” another violinist, Maxim Vengerov, can too: On April 19 and 20, he is doing all the Mozart concertos with the UBS Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Vengerov is known as a Romantic and wizard, but any musician worth his salt can play Mozart, and Mr. Vengerov is one. On April 21, the violinist Gil Shaham will feature in a chamber program — all-Brahms — and one of his partners will be Ricardo Morales, the extremely gifted clarinetist.

On May 11, the soprano Deborah Voigt will give a recital, and, if it is anything like her last Carnegie Hall recital, it will be boffo. She will sing one of the world’s worst and stupidest songs — Leonard Bernstein’s anti-Vietnam ditty “So Pretty,” a monument of moral confusion — but that is a light affliction. Then, on May 20, another soprano, the glittering Frenchwoman Natalie Dessay, will sing with the Met Orchestra under James Levine. One of her offerings will be the Gavotte from “Manon,” which she should sing the daylights out of.

Finally, on May 30, Anna Netrebko, the Russian soprano and superstar, will make her long-awaited Carnegie Hall debut with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Also on the bill will be her friend and colleague Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the baritone. In all likelihood, every heart in the hall will be palpitating.

Go, now, to Great Performers at Lincoln Center. On April 24, the violinist Midori will give a recital with her regular pianist, Robert McDonald. They will play an attractive mixed program, which will include a piece by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. My colleague, Fred Kirshnit, has a friend who likes to say this about contemporary music: “I don’t know a Rautavaara from a rutabaga.”

On April 29, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the awesomely talented French pianist, will play Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Esa-Pekka Salonen. Some days later (May 3), another awesomely talented performer, Renée Fleming, will sing with that same orchestra and conductor. She will do Strauss and Korngold, in which she is unsurpassed, and barely equaled.

The New York Philharmonic? Beginning on April 12, Sakari Oramo, the accomplished young Finnish conductor, will guest-conduct a subscription concert. On the program will be, inevitably, Sibelius. (I have mentioned a lot of Finns in this little piece, haven’t I?) And starting on April 25, Anne-Sophie Mutter will play the Berg Violin Concerto, with Lorin Maazel on the podium. Could be very, very good — or not.

Last, a highlight from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: On April 15 and 17, the Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager will be on hand. She will sing a work by Charles Martin Loeffler — a nearly forgotten but fine American composer who lived from 1861 to 1935 — and a work by Nicholas Maw, the contemporary British composer. She will sing with notable intelligence, beauty, and charisma, or your money back. (I’m not in a position to make such a pledge, but you know what I mean.)