Page 104 - FINAL_RPS Awards 2021 Coverage Book_Full (2)

The RPS Awards have long shone a light on projects and events which might
otherwise have stayed in the shadows, for being smaller or simply local, but whose

impact on audiences and participants can be no less profound – and sometimes
more so – than a famed virtuoso in a world class auditorium. But that almost a third

of this year's 13 categories, which were announced last night at London's Wigmore
Hall, so specifically focussed on music's potential impact – to use another of those
terms – on communities, on society at large, on people and places, lent this year's

event a perhaps polemical, and certainly timely, feel. They were, then, Awards as
much about what music does, as what it is - and taken as a whole offer a powerful

retort to anyone who might ever suggest classical music is a detached art form.

Such a spirit ran through the winners and shortlists of even the more prosaically
titled categories. The Chamber-Scale Composition Award was given to Laura Bowler
for Wicked Problems, a work confronting climate change. Jennifer Johnston took the

Singer Award for her work as Artist in Residence with the Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic and for developing digital platforms to keep creativity alive during

Covid. And through her educational and carefully-judged public interventions, the
tireless Nicola Benedetti – this year's Instrumentalist winner – stands head and

shoulders above pretty much any other star soloist when it comes to harnessing the
possibilities of music to shape and transform lives.

Another term, incidentally, was nicely thrown into proceedings by the winners of the
Young Artist Award, the superb Hermes Experiment. When your line-up consists of a

singer, harp, clarinet and double-bass, the need to commission new works is
something of a given – but what a catalyst for creativity it's been. Experiment: that

could be an intriguing new additional category for another year.

And while, like them, many of the winning projects were not directly related to Covid

– such as Bold Tendencies, which hosts classical concerts in a Peckham multi-
storey car park, or Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason's account of the raising of her remarkable

family, House of Music – this year's event still felt, understandably, a pandemic
Awards. Few were the recipients who hadn't engaged with the Covid-crisis in some

way, bringing comfort or camaraderie in challenging times. Or even, in the case of
the Impact Award, actually affected people's health: the winner, ENO Breathe,

having worked with Imperial College Healthcare to use singing techniques to help
those recovering from Covid address their breathing and anxiety.