The last time Theatre of Voices performed Stockhausen’s STIMMUNG in London was at the Albert Hall, at a late night Prom in 2008, so Kings Place made for a much more intimate setting. In fact, the work, which is for six unaccompanied voices, relies heavily on electronic amplification, so can be adapted to almost any environment. And Kings Place proved perfect, with its sympathetic acoustic and hi-tech audio array.

They were billed as a Trio, but when the classical super-group of Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich came together at the Barbican last night it was in a sequence of different combinations, each with their own musical identity. The centre of gravity, however, remained constant. Martha Argerich, the only performer present throughout, may have reinvented herself and her sound fifty times in the course of the evening, now asserting, now effacing, but it was she who rooted the whole, who provided the fixed compass point around which her colleagues roamed so freely.

"You have to start somewhere," Debussy is reported to have said at the 1910 premiere of The Firebird. Which, at least, is a very good "somewhere" for Stravinsky, shot through with flashes of the personality to come. The Symphony in E flat of two years earlier, however, is little more than a theme park of all the ingredients amassed in Russian music since Glinka forged its identity less than a century earlier.

You can't have too much Dvořák in a single evening, at least not when the works in question operate at the highest level of volatility and melodic abundance like last night's overture, concerto and symphony.

It began in semi-darkness. Appropriate for Arvo Pärt, perhaps – after all, Manchester Camerata have played his music in Manchester Cathedral to great atmospheric effect in the past. But the Choir of Clare College Cambridge, conducted by Graham Ross, delivered his Da pacem Domine in a hall where it seemed as if the lights had failed … not quite the same thing.

Make Arvo Pärt the bulwark of any concert and you can surprise as well as delight the full house he’s likely to win you with the rest of your chosen programme. This was a beautifully planned showcase for the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under its Latvian conductor Kaspars Putniņš, poised between the introspective and the extrovert both within the all-Pärt first half and what followed after the interval, where Estonian composers no less precious than Pärt to their compatriots framed the late Jonathan Harvey’s mesmerising seraphics.

Jörg Widmann writes fast. He is also one of the few young German composers who can write distinctive and idiomatic music without feeling the weight of his country’s musical heritage on his shoulders at every turn. Surprisingly, then, his Clarinet Quintet, which here received its UK premiere at Wigmore Hall, was eight years in the making, and was initially abandoned because "music history ... suddenly appeared as a great burden".

Oliver Knussen and the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra here took us on a whistle-stop tour of Stravinsky, early and late. Few composers changed so in style so dramatically over the course of their career, so there was plenty of variety here. And just for good measure, a work by Stravinsky’s teacher Rimsky-Korsakov was included too, his Russian Easter Festival Overture. Both composers were excellent orchestrators, and Knussen’s programme proved ideal for showcasing the players’ talents.

You could probably guess from the assembling audience that the orchestra making its Barbican debut last night came from Milan. That many mink coats rarely congregate in a London concert hall.

You can’t help liking Joshua Bell. The Peter Pan violin soloist of the classical world has been in the business for more than 30 years and still has his boyish looks and, more importantly, his enthusiasm and sense of enjoyment in making music. At the Bridgewater Hall last night the pages of his score stuck together at one point between movements, but he had a quip for the audience and carried on with a smile.