Page 48 - Final_RPS Awards 2020 Media Coverage Book

powerful and poignant performances many of us can recall. It was therefore with a perhaps

unusually heightened sense of emotion that the Royal Philharmonic Society tonight unveiled its
2020 Awards, its annual celebration of classical music-making in the UK.

The online ceremony was opened by RPS Chairman John Gilhooly – particularly appropriate given
that London’s Wigmore Hall, of which he is Artistic and Executive Director (and where the

ceremony was held), proved foremost and indeed first in offering, and advocating for, live
performance over the past year – with a speech challenging politicians and encouraging the wider

classical community to make sure that our current if curtailed musical life survives the pandemic,
and thrives thereafter.

‘The sector is making huge efforts to draw in audiences safely for live performance and we need
those in power to look again and help us achieve all of this,’ he said, adding also that: ‘We need a

faster solution for getting aid to the self-employed.’ Among other specific calls was for exemption
from quarantine to be granted for artists travelling in and out of the country when this becomes

possible again. ‘We need to draw on every resource we can to heal and rebuild our society, and
cannot allow music to be neglected or overlooked in this,’ Gilhooly said.

But – as always, and as appropriate – the event was primarily about recognising and rewarding
some of the finest artists of our day. Among the recipients was Dalia Stasevska, who conducted

the broadcast Last Night of the Proms – a concert which attracted controversy in advance and
largely praise afterwards – and who won the Conductor Award. Viola player Lawrence Power,

whose recent projects include a series of commissions filmed in lockdown, was named
Instrumentalist of the Year. Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who together with his siblings regularly

invited virtual audiences into his family home to witness uplifting music-making during lockdown,
was named best Young Artist. Gramophone’s current young Artist of the Year, meanwhile,

soprano Natalya Romaniw, took the RPS’s Singer Award.

Specific live events and series honoured included Kings Place’s year-long celebration of female

composers Venus Unwrapped, while Garsington Opera’s The Turn of the Screw won the Opera
and Music Theatre Award. Performances associated with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music

Festival claimed two prizes - Naomi Pinnock’s I am, I am in the Chamber-Scale Composition
category and, in the Large-Scale Composition category, Frank Denyer’s The Fish that Became the

Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed).

The RPS Awards regularly highlight organisations that seek to transform lives through music, or

indeed to transform our understanding of music’s place in society itself. Recognised this year was
the City of London Sinfonia’s Sound Young Minds, which, working alongside Bethlem and

Maudsley Hospital School ‘defined how classical musicians can play a transformative role in the
lives of teenagers with mental health issues.’ A newly created Inspiration Award directly sought to

recognise organisations and ideas whose work had, in the words of the RPS, ‘uplifted the nation in