AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

THE MUSICIANS ARRANGE THEMSELVES – DISTANCED, MOSTLY MASKED – on the stage the London Symphony Orchestra has called home for 40 years, but from which it hasn’t played for 14 pandemic months. After all this time without live music, the sound of tuning up is enough to send a shiver down the spine.

This is the LSO’s rehearsal for the last of many concerts streamed around the world during Covid, before it welcomed its first live audience on 18 May. “And now, here we are,” says Sir Simon Rattle, its principal conductor, “the LSO returning to the Barbican, and our public. And we all keep saying: ‘Oh my God, how we have missed this.’”

The orchestra plays Mahler’s shattering Das Lied von der Erde – The Song of the Earth. For the emergence from lockdown, though – “We need pure joy,” says Rattle – it played Dvo?ák’s effervescent Slavonic Dances

But it has been a hard road. The last time the LSO played on this stage was March 2020, for Vaughan Williams’s desolate wartime symphonies Nos 4 and 6. Britain locked down that night. The orchestra was initially silenced, then based at its own space in a converted church, LSO St Luke’s, the venue for the beginning of the end