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Fiona Maddocks’s best classical music of 2021

Conductors came and went, while the return of live performances – from the Albert Hall to urban sheds and rustic glades – felt like a gift as never before

We hoped this would be the year everything would come right: that concert venues would buzz with capacity crowds; that musicians would be back in full-time work; that soloists might again travel without fear of quarantine and testing (quite aside from the unresolved difficulties caused by Brexit) – above all, that Covid-19 would vanish. Instead, Omicron gallops ahead and even optimists must accept we’re not there yet.

For all the cancellations and underlying mood of chaos, countless musical events touched lives. The BBC Proms, cautiously but definitively, were back, with premieres from Charlotte Bray, Shiva Feshareki, Britta Byström, Grace-Evangeline Mason, George Benjamin and more. Highlights included John Wilson and his lithe Sinfonia of London; the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, revelatory in Mozart’s last symphonies; the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson wowing the crowds in his Proms debut. Another pianist, Janeba Kanneh-Mason, introduced Florence Price’s one-movement concerto to the Proms.

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