Exactly one year ago today, March 7th, in Paris, was the last concert I took part in, with the BBC Concert Orchestra, that was performed to a ‘normal’ attendant audience. The virus was already spreading around Europe, but the audience wasn’t distanced, nobody wore a mask; though I do recall a little more hand-washing than normal happening backstage before the concert. There was a feeling that this might be one of the last concerts we all did for a little while. The very next day, whilst on the Eurostar travelling back to London, France banned gatherings of more than 1000 people, and over the next few weeks the rest of the world followed suit. Concerts, theatre, musicals – everything very quickly ground to a halt, and so around about now, all of us in the performing arts are noting that one year anniversary with mixed emotions.

The first few weeks of the pandemic and lockdown were filled with a sense of novelty for many people, (me included), along with the helplessly-naive notion that this would all pass in a few weeks, a couple of months at worst. Trying to remember what I did in those early weeks and months, I have to scroll back through the photos on my phone. Gardening, walking the dog, cooking, and documenting my beard growth seem to have been the most frequently photographed pastimes.

One of the realities of my professional life that I’ve always been aware of, but was pulled into sharp focus very quickly, was that, if I’m not playing somebody else’s piano, I’m not really making any money. There are a few compositional, arranging and transcription jobs I get asked to do to make me a little extra on the side, but in normal times I do those in the gaps in my diary. Now I had all the time in the world to do those things as well as crack on and write my own music, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that motivating oneself when there is no deadline for something is a particular agony for many. Mercifully, a few very kind people put some jobs I could do from home my way, and that kept my brain engaged with music on a practical level. It’s amazing how quickly you can become rusty at things that were previously simple everyday professional skills. But new skills we have learned too, either out of necessity, or boredom, and I’ve been amazed over the past year how so many musicians and performers have responded to a new and different reality. The variety of invention, the exploring of new avenues of self-expression and collaboration, engagement with an audience, has been wonderful to see.  People can be endlessly inventive when they need to be. Also thoroughly deserving of acknowledgement are the people and organisations who as the year went on, found ways and means to get musicians and performers back doing what they do, albeit through legal necessity, in slightly modified circumstances, surroundings and numbers.

The great institutional centrepiece of classical music in the UK, The BBC Proms was cancelled save for a two-week broadcasting of live concerts at the end of the season. I was lucky enough to play in one of them – but the sensation of playing a proper concert, live on tv, in a hall that normally would have had several thousand people in it being totally empty, aside from the BBC Concert Orchestra & its management, BBC/RAH technical staff and the radio announcer, was surreal. I think if one sound could encapsulate the past year from a professional perspective, it’s the sound of performers clapping each other at the end of any particular piece. Or silence. Along with the mild visual awkwardness of the “do we/don’t we stand up/bow?” Conversations are had about those things these days when you do a streamed concert – things that you’d just do without thinking as a matter of course in the past.

It’s not my intention here to make a survey of everything that has happened, either to me or anyone else in our business, but a year has passed and I felt a need to mark it some way. We’re all looking towards the future with cautious optimism. From speaking with friends and colleagues I know all sorts of organisations have plans ready to go for steady returns to normal patterns of work, and even some foreign tours are being lightly pencilled into various schedules.

There is a future out there for the performing arts, not too far ahead, where we will once again be able to look a full audience directly in the eye. I suspect those first concerts will indeed be a very emotional experience for everyone.