Attending my first live concert in over a year felt wonderful. In the atmospheric Battersea Arts Centre Nicola Benedetti and her handpicked ensemble of some of period performance’s finest players were performing works from her new album of Italian Baroque music, on a sultry summer evening pushing 30 degrees, conditions which couldn’t have felt more authentic short of exchanging the Thames for the Tiber. Even the stage backdrop, Battersea’s bare brick evoking the faded grandeur of an ancient palazzo, played its part.

The format was part determined by circumstances, and part by this ever-exploratory violinist’s desire to reach people in different ways – a one-hour programme repeated twice over four days (during which the stubborn heat granted our intrepid ensemble no relief). And it was glorious. For while Benedetti has spoken movingly, on the Gramophone podcast (listen here) and elsewhere, about what the return of audiences meant to her, what grabbed me most was the rapport between the artists. Baroque music is of course tailor-made for this – the theatrical passing of phrases, the infectious dance-like rhythms – but even so, there were moments of balletic unison between Benedetti and her colleagues that would have impressed our Olympic synchronised swimmers. It felt joyous to watch because it was clearly joyous to be playing. 

Joy in music-making: Nicola Benedetti performing Baroque Music in Battersea Arts Centre (photo: Craig Gibson)

I was reminded of when I interviewed Frank Gehry about building Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the experiments in how best to create an intimacy between audience and orchestra. He discovered that it wasn’t just about sightlines or proximity between watcher and watched – it was about the relationship between the players themselves. Get their seating, their relationship, right, and the chemistry bursts from stage to stalls, and even the back circle feels drawn right down into the action; a ‘magic trick’ as Gehry modestly put it.

The best recordings can capture something of this; look no further than the Collection on Beethoven’s B flat String Quartet, Op 130, in this month's Gramophone, where Richard Whitehouse explores how the rapport between players is what transforms a good performance into a profound one. Such articles – and I’m thinking of Rob Cowan’s historic pages, too – demonstrate that even the oldest examples of the recording medium can bring a great ensemble alive for ears today; but even so, I’m grateful to be living in an era in which the highest-fidelity recording and reproduction technology can make music-making sound more vivid than ever before.

But I’m equally grateful to be able to once again see the music-making happening in front of me. People often look at the things Covid curtailed and say we took them for granted. I’m not sure any true lovers of live music ever took it for granted – but perhaps we may now cherish its existence all the more, filled with hope that the dark days of darkened halls may never return. Back in Battersea, Benedetti had played us a concerto depicting a storm, and as I stepped outside afterwards the water on the ground and freshly fragrant air suggested there might have only just been one. In any case it had passed now, and instead, arching high over London, was the most beautiful rainbow.

This article appears in the September edition of Gramophone, on sale now