When I mention Nature Unwrapped, a year-long series at Kings Place subtitled "Sounds of Life", the responses are often tinged with cynicism: "Oh, very 2020", "So, what’s the carbon footprint with all those musicians flying in?" There’s an assumption that the series is focused solely on climate change and current protest.

Why does music suddenly disappear? It is all the more heartening when a work as excellent and enjoyable as Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No 3 takes wing once more, but you do have to wonder how in the world such a terrific orchestral piece was permitted to sink and vanish in its day under a morass of dubious opera.

At this time of year the musical world – and particularly the choral world – is full of festive concerts, and the challenge can be to find programmes venturing off the well-worn path of traditional favourites.

There aren’t many musicians who could appear as composer, singer and violist on a single programme but that was Caroline Shaw’s lot last night.

Mozart’s piano concertos often overflow with good humour, but you seldom expect to hear a hearty chuckle from the audience in the middle of a performance of one. Yet something close to a guffaw burst out around King’s Place when soloist Tom Poster, deep into the last-movement cadenza of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, suddenly quoted Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Poster had played the Gershwin before the interval of this typically smart, eclectic and thought-provoking programme from the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.

Some of the greatest pieces of the string orchestra repertoire are based on pre-existing pieces: the fantasias by Tippett and Vaughan Williams, on Corelli and Tallis respectively, treat their starting material with invention and sweep, creating something new, bigger and better than their sources. But throughout Lera Auerbach’s Dialogues on Stabat Mater (after Pergolesi) last night I felt nothing other than the desire to hear the Pergolesi original, unadorned and unmeddled-with.

Elf Lyons’ new show, Love Songs To Guinea Pigs, has moved away from her usual slapstick and absurdist mimicry into new realms of traditional stand up. She cites the reason as being unable to do mime on the radio, but there’s a more serious reason for the switch.

After ChifChaff, her Edinburgh show last year, and a string of shows involving ballet, hula hooping and ice skating, the comic found herself in bed, paralysed from the waist down. What came next was corrective spinal surgery, adoption of two guinea pigs, a bout of depression, a break up, and a return to the stage.

We’ve been friends for many years, since the mid-1990s when we were both studying at the Royal College of Music with the same inspirational piano teacher, Irina Zaritskaya. Our first duo performance was in 2001 at the Homecoming Festival in Moscow, when we realised we clicked musically. Things gradually developed from that point onwards with more festival appearances alongside our solo careers.

Kings Place Hall One is a slightly strange venue, its small stage size seeming out of proportion for the dimensions of the room. It means only a chamber orchestra can fit on stage – and even then they often look uncomfortably squashed, especially with a piano for company.

How often do two contemporary women composers get to take a stage bow during a solo recital of no more than modest length? Last night at Kings Place, within an eclectic bill of fare dubbed “Soul of a Woman” as part of the venue’s Venus Unwrapped season, Joanna MacGregor performed a brace of piano pieces by members of the audience: the Jamaican composer Eleanor Alberga and, as her unscheduled encore, Freya Waley-Cohen’s “Southern Leaves”. In the latter, the prolific and versatile Waley-Cohen channels the spirit and the struggle of Nina Simone with a lyricism striated by sorrow.