Page 45 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

Katie Derham
The BBC Proms is always something of a musical miracle. And this year’s season
has been an outstanding celebration of what is possible in these strange times.
We’ve had six weeks enjoying the best of the best – a fantasy Proms if you like,
reliving standout moments from seasons gone by. Now, for two whole weeks, live
music is returning to the Royal Albert Hall. With carefully chosen repertoire, and with
smaller and socially distanced ensembles cleverly using the space, some of the
finest musicians in the world will again be delivering what the Proms does best –
bringing the best live music to the biggest possible TV and radio audiences.

The line-up is a mouth-watering selection of Proms favourites. I can’t wait to hear
two of the finest young violinists in the world, Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova,
joining forces for an evening of double violin concertos with the Orchestra of the Age
of Enlightenment. Sir Simon Rattle will be unmissable, at the helm of the London
Symphony Orchestra conducting his seventy-fifth Prom in a programme of Elgar,
Vaughan Williams and a new work by Thomas Adès, especially as he’s joined by the
incomparable Mitsuko Uchida playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Conductor
Jules Buckley is becoming something of a Proms fixture with his inventive, multi-
genre collaborations and he’s teaming up with another musician who always
surprises and excites, the sitar player, Anoushka Shankar.

For me, though, the highlight is always the Last Night. It’ll be different this year – no
question of that. We’re going to be relying on you at home for the audience reaction
… but I can’t wait to hear the golden voice of soprano Golda Schultz, and to see
what the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s young new principal guest conductor, Dalia
Stasevska, has planned.

Tom Service
Live music is always about the same thing: a communion, hopefully an ecstatic
communion, between performers and audience. This year we need that communion
more than ever; we need to be touched more than usual by music, because we’ve
not been able to be touched by other human beings, and we need to feel that
emotional and spiritual connection.

So on the one hand we know that this year’s Proms are more important than ever,
but on the other hand, we’re all feeling the absence of an audience acutely. There’s