Oh to have been in the beautiful surrounds of Cadogan Hall last night – not just to have experienced the gorgeous wall of sound, heartfelt artistry and musical camaraderie at first hand, but also to have been able to show our appreciation for a concert which takes months of preparation.

Singer/pianist/songwriter/entertainer Joe Stilgoe responded remarkably rapidly to the new circumstances of March 2020. Even before the first nationwide lockdown was declared, he had started doing a series of daily performances on YouTube: “Stilgoe In The Shed”.

When Katie Melua arrived on the scene in 2003, a graduate of the BRIT School and a protégé of Mike "Wombling" Batt, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Another one in a long list of tepid female singer-songwriters that were pleasant enough, but… Then I pitched up, without too much enthusiasm, to review her Christmas concert at Westminster Central Hall with the Gori Women’s Choir in December 2018 and was both moved and impressed.

Emma-Lee Moss has a lovely voice. It conveys an ache, a longing, but is sweet too, and well-mannered. Combine this with an aptitude for literate, thought-provoking lyrics and hooky songs, and Emmy the Great is quite the package. It’s a mystery, then, why she has not been critically and commercially elevated to the status of peers such as Laura Marling and KT Tunstall. Her fourth album is a delight, rich in imagery and ideas. It confirms her as an artist always well worth following.

Sufjan Stevens is an artist of remarkable ambition. His 80-minute long new album, with 15 beautiful and poetic songs, belongs to a long line of pop experimentation that runs through from The Beatles and George Martin’s Stg Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Björk’s own highly literate and endlessly inventive mix of dance music and daredevil sonic exploration.

“Produced by Tommy LiPuma.” That phrase has appeared on just about every Diana Krall album since the summer of 1995, when the Cleveland-born mogul arrived at the GRP label – it would be his sixth and last music industry affiliation – and promptly signed the Canadian singer-pianist.

Music has never been more important than in these dark, dislocating and death-stalked days, fear and grief visiting us in ways once unimaginable. The lack of live music – the lack even of the possibility of live music in the near future – is an absence keenly felt. However much we love to listen in the isolation of our own headphones, nothing can ever replace the communal concert event.

Suzanne Vega sprang to fame 35 years ago, her eponymous debut one of the last albums we bought in vinyl before the advent of that new-fangled format of aluminium aspic. From it came “Marlene on the Wall”, the video an MTV hit. “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner”, from Solitude Standing, Vega’s second outing, cemented her reputation: drawn from real life, each were unusual chart successes – the first told from the point of view of an abused child, the second a cappella. Vega was the first woman to headline at Glastonbury.

Declan McKenna covers many bases. He’s a good looking, teen-friendly pop star who first made waves aged only 15, but he’s also a politically engaged lyricist with aspirations in the region of Bowie and Dylan.

The title, translated from the Portuguese, is “now” – an immediacy that, on first listen, seems apt for Bebel Gilberto’s lush and loose Agora.