History’s most grotesque act of cynicism has to be the model ghetto the Nazis mocked up for the cameras in Terezin/Theresienstadt in October 1944, several days before transporting all the musicians and smartly-dressed attendees present at the concert included in the film to Auschwitz.

This remarkable evening should really have been more remarkable still. The unfortunate pianist Cédric Tiberghien took an official pre-travel Covid test that obliged him to drop out at 5pm – even though, as he tweeted in frustration, three subsequent lateral flow tests came out negative. Such is concert life in the Covid era. Nobody could be expected to find a replacement to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at two hours’ notice, so the work was dropped.

“It mustn’t be a surface thing. You have to put in the work,” Janet Baker once said. Sandrine Piau’s Wigmore recital of German song followed by French song was the perfect demonstration of that credo in action.

Having conducted two Discovery programmes with the LSO after being a finalist in the 2016 Donatella Flick competition, London-born Kerem Hasan went on to win the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award in 2017.

After a too-much-too-soon debut disc, Lisa Davidsen has just rolled out the gold on CD with her great fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes in songs by their compatriot Grieg.

As the catastrophe unfolded in 2020, it seemed reasonable to speculate that the biggest orchestral works – Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies, Strauss tone poems among them – probably wouldn’t be heard live in our concert halls for years.

The Voces8 online festivals – which were born of a need to keep the show on the road during at the beginning of the pandemic – have rapidly become a fixture of the musical landscape, setting the bar for online presentation of choral music and broadening the reach of all the groups involved.

It had been a tense week, explained Jonathan Sells, the artistic director and bass-baritone of Solomon’s Knot, from the stage of the Wigmore Hall: unsure if the concert would go ahead, unsure who exactly would be able to perform, unsure if there would be anyone in the audience.

This time last year, the moment I knew things were really bad was when the Dunedin Consort cancelled Messiah. All performances since the summer of 2020 had been online films, but Dunedin cancelled even their online Messiah because it would involve performers travelling from all corners of the UK to do it. Sure enough, a couple of days later, what we then called the “Kent variant” appeared, and the grim winter lockdown began.

The Sixteen are one of the jewels of the choral world. For over 40 years they have led the way in singing excellence and programming that brings together old and new.