The world’s biggest classical music festival is under way – and the 2020 edition is like none before

We all know the drill at the start of a concert: the chatter and rustle, then that charged silence before the first notes are heard. The sense of a shared experience, a collective act, is a powerful one – but is it powerful enough to reach all the way into my kitchen, where this summer I will sit alone listening to the 125th season of the BBC Proms each night on Radio 3?

It has become a marketing cliché to talk of a season “unlike any other”, but the 2020 Proms really is unprecedented – an all-bets-are-off, seat-of-the-pants, keep-calm-and-carry-on collection of concerts that is still evolving as we speak.

When the extent of the Covid crisis became clear back in March there were inevitably rumours of cancellation. How could there not be, when the pulse of what is still the world’s biggest classical music festival is the jostle and hum of the hundreds of tightly packed Prommers that stand at the heart of the action? But this is a festival that two World Wars failed to derail, one that has already demonstrated its resilience and adaptability under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, and the show will go on.