Yesterday evening would have been the birthday of Patrick O'Connor, and so in his memory, and in celebration both joyful and touching of his enthusiasms, a concert was held at London's Wigmore Hall.

I was privileged to have worked with Patrick since I joined Gramophone some eight years ago - his relationship with the magazine went back much further of course. But so great were his multifaceted areas of interest that for every person who recalls with fondness his erudition, eloquence and advocacy within these pages, another, who thought they knew Patrick equally well, might well say “Ah, he did that as well, did he?”. If that is the case, a tome's worth of expertly crafted reviews and articles, rich in delicately delivered fact, and thoughtful and always kindly crafted critique, awaits such a person.

Patrick wrote about the voice, and tonight the soprano Susana Gaspar, tenor Paul Austin Kelly and mezzo Lucy Schaufer gave of their time to help us share in Patrick's love of music by Ned Rorem, Reynaldo Hahn (also, indeed, himself heard singing the music of Offenbach via onstage speakers), Debussy, Strauss, Schubert and, possibly Patrick's favourite we learn, Poulenc. On the piano, pianists Asako Ogawa, Yoko Hirao and composer Jonathan Dove also evoked the colour, opulence and melancholy of turn-of-the-(20th)century France, as well as the smoky stages of Weill and Brecht's world. A nod to Patrick's biography of Josephine Baker came from burlesque artist Marianne Cheesecake, whose recreation of Baker's risqué 1920s Banana Dance left even the Soul of Music in the mural above looking a little demure.

The evening ended with a recording of Yvonne Printemps singing Poulenc, the swooning voice mingling in the mind with the description we'd earlier heard recounted of Patrick letting a shellac 78 slip from its sleeve before expertly cranking up the gramophone, to close events on a poignant note.

Back home, I dug through my still-unpacked boxes of CDs – like Patrick had so recently done, I too have just moved into central London – to find Hahn's À Chloris, touchingly performed in the evening’s concert by Susana Gaspar, though here sung by the superb young contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Sitting listening, staring out into the late-night London light, it seemed so sad that Patrick had been denied more than a few months to make the most of his much-looked-forward-to geographic proximity to so much that he loved. But as À Chloris gave way to a more upbeat Robert Louis Stevenson song setting, following which I knocked Yvonne Printemps into Spotify (which was something I doubt Patrick ever did), I decided that a fine way to pay tribute to Patrick will be to endeavour to enjoy London life just as much as he had planned to do, ever mindful of the title given to the evening's concert, taken from a Weill song: One Life to Live.

The concert launched the Patrick O'Connor Memorial Fund, which will jointly support The Nightingale Project, an organisation which brings music and art to mental health hospitals, and the Musicians Benevolent Fund. If you’d like to contribute, please email Nick Rhodes for more information.