While tonight at the Royal Albert Hall wasn’t quite back to normal it offered some joyful moments
The first Prom to welcome an audience back into the Royal Albert Hall began with a work of low-key celebration, Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music. As its last chord died away, something else took its place: a collective silence, the kind that’s conjured when hundreds of people hold their breath, all listening intently to the same thing. This kind of delicious communal moment is what was missing last summer, when the Proms were performed with no audience in the hall.
Things aren’t quite back to normal yet. This season runs for six weeks, not eight. To make more room for distanced orchestral players, the stage has been expanded. And although seats are being sold with no social distancing and there’s the potential for audiences to reach something approaching 5,000, that wasn’t the case: the arena can’t have held more than 150 prommers standing, and anyone daunted by the idea of sitting up close to a stranger for two hours will have been reassured to see plenty of empty seats. But the audience was big enough to create a buzz. As the conductor Dalia Stasevska greeted the audience with a delighted wave, the mood was jubilant.
