One of the ‘biggest nights in UK classical music’, the RPS Awards shine a light on brilliant musical individuals, groups and initiatives inspiring communities across the UK.
This year, for the very first time, the RPS Awards are leaving London - and heading north to Manchester - the city that is home to two of last year’s RPS Award-winners (and Mag North friends) - Manchester Collective and Manchester Camerata.
Naturally, the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) is set to be the perfect host venue on Tuesday 5 March – and with all tickets priced only £10 to £25 (some still available HERE) Northern music-lovers should not miss this very special experience.
Before we head to Oxford Road for the big night, we jumped at the chance to catch up with RPS Chief Executive James Murphy, who it’s fair to say has led something of a revolution around the awards.
James was acutely aware of the potentially elitist perception of both the Royal Philharmonic Society - and it’s glitzy award night, when he became Chief Exec in 2018:
“The RPS as an entity has always done various things to recognise excellence and support musicians in different ways, but recognising excellence first took the form of an awards ceremony in the 1980s. At that point, it was a very deluxe VIP experience at the Dorchester Ballroom. Most of us couldn't afford a ticket, because back then they cost around two hundred pounds.
“When I came to run the RPS myself in 2018, we looked closely at everything about the charity - and we asked the question - ‘What are awards for?’ They’re an opportunity to shine a light on really great things that are happening in any particular realm, so it seemed to me that to conceal that from the world and to do it in a place where only a very exalted few could go and experience it didn’t seem right.
“These awards are celebrating a whole range of things nationally. There are categories for the best singer or the best instrumentalist, but a lot of categories are for ventures that are happening specific to localities and specific to particular areas. I’ve been really aware of the importance and scope of telling a national story about music, not just about what’s going on in the capital.
“It just seems to me that we should take this ceremony into civic spaces. We did it at Battersea Art Centre in 2019 - and since then we’ve tried to inhabit concert hall-type spaces and made tickets the same price as a concert ticket or cheaper if we can.”
Last year’s awards took place at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, so how did the decision to leave the capital - and where to go - come about?
James: “There are lots of places I would love to go, but there is something about Manchester that is such a stronghold for classical music. To have two symphony orchestras, the music college, the specialist music school. And also then these fantastic chamber orchestras. Organisations like [Manchester] Camerata and more recently Manchester Collective, are really asking big questions of what society should look like and how music fits in that space. So it just seems a sort of obvious place to go, and also last year Manchester Collective won our Ensemble Award and Camerata won our storytelling award for a beautiful film they made about their work with dementia, so I think it was a real calling to come to the city.
“The Northern [RNCM] is itself asking a lot of questions about classical music in the future and for the young people at the college to see this thing coming to them, which in a way is almost like an advent calendar of all the different futures they could have as musicians - it seems really great to do that in a space with young musicians able to come to the show.”
James goes on to describe Manchester Collective as ‘Lighter on their feet than some’ and able to inspire in a way many ensembles don’t: “I think we have all been refreshed a bit by Manchester Collective in some regards.”
We talk about Camerata’s Amina Hussain - and what music can do in an informal setting.
“Amina and I were involved in a session at the Association of British Orchestras Conference last week. She’s now Camerata’s principal flautist and resident music therapist. That’s the first time that has ever happened as far as I know in the UK, if not the world - it opens up Pandora’s box in terms of what a musician can be. I’ve spent a lot of my career working with young musicians and I think often they look at the future and just see us a few very narrow prospects, but what the likes of Adam and Rakhi [from Manchester Collective] have done and what Amina is doing at Manchester Camerata is saying: oh no - everything is for the taking - and I love that.
“We all know that for all of us in some regard, music has lifted us. It has directed us, it has consoled us, it has saved us to some extent. We don’t talk about that very much.”
The Inspiration category is decided by an open vote - and the North has done rather well in this year’s shortlist. A category that grew from the efforts of both professional and amateur musicians during the pandemic to ‘keep music alive’, is now a staple of the event.
James: “This award is specifically for non professional musicians because the truth is they outnumber the professionals in this country by a great extent. There are thousands and thousands of non professional musicians in the UK and they’re such an amazing part of our heritage. There are some astoundingly good-quality groups, including some of those nominated this year - and the excellence in terms of the care that they have for their community, the role that they have in their community and what they bring - has to be celebrated.”
The public votes for this category have exceeded 5300 this year and are a tremendous sign of how much musical groups are valued in communities. The shortlist includes Derwent Brass, Glasgow Madrigirls, Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus and Manchester’s own The Sunday Boys.
“It’s an incredible tapestry. It’s really lovely to have that opportunity to celebrate those things - and people. Everyone has a moment, so I have a brilliant digital designer and creative producer and we’ve drawn assets from every nominee and we’ll thread them into some rather special projections on the evening, so everyone gets their moment and you hear a bit about what the panel thought was fabulous about them. Of course there has to be a winner for each award, but we want everyone to feel like they really matter.”
James is particularly keen to talk too about the Instrumentalist category: “We've got the black cellist, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who’s also a singer and a composer and a pianist, and songwriter. She really is melding genres. And then we have the Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov, who is just an absolutely spectacularly brilliant pianist at the very highest level. He’s interested in curation and working with dance as well as all of his really pure concerto and recital performances. We have the Leeds-based sitar player Jasdeep Singh Degun who isn’t just playing sitar music in a traditional sense, but has just been collaborating with Opera North and the really fantastic production of Orpheus and Eurydice. He’s now an associate artist at the Royal Northern and working not just with young sitar players, but working with musicians across the board. And I just love that between the three of them they represent so much.”
James refers to the RPS event as an ‘awards locomotive’ and the work to make Manchester’s moment special began last summer. “We’ve had the awards for over 30 years now, but we’re doing this now in the context of a struggle for the arts and so many pronouncements over the last year of funding cuts or something being either completely decimated or stripped back to its bare essentials - and the whole sector is rocked and traumatised by that. And so in those circumstances, this event has sort of taken on a rather Important role in that for once.
“We’re not the subject of the story. We’re literally getting on the front foot and saying ‘look how brilliant classical music is, look at all the different things that classical music entails. Look at the resonance’."
And the message we need to communicate loudly and clearly - not just about the RPS Awards in Manchester, but also the work of the Royal Philharmonic Society day in - day out?
“Well…we are a registered charity that supports, protects and celebrates classical music and musicians in the UK through year-round activity. We offer a range of grants for performance commissions for composers and musicians at different stages in their careers. For example, we have a fund that helps first-year instrumentalist students who’ve got to their music college through their talent, but they have very little financial means - and some of them don’t even own an instrument of their own. We have a fund they can apply for, that allows them to buy instruments - it’s a grant - not a loan.
“We have a whole range of things like that, that help musicians at key stages in their development - and then with this big moment once a year [the awards], we set out to tell a story about classical music-making in this country. The RPS awards this year, isn’t just about those winning categories - we’re not just telling their story - the point is that they are representative of thousands more musicians that are working nationwide, and we’re using this event to say: look how brilliant classical musicians are. Musicians are in their communities - and on stages.
“It's not said very much, but a concert hall is a mass well-being centre. All of us who go to concerts - we’re not entirely placid and contented in life. We’re going to concerts because we are seeking consolation, solace, encouragement and fortification of some kind - and classical music is fulfilling that role. In every regard, musicians are not mere ornaments, they’re injecting society with some kind of vital panacea and our guests at the awards hopefully recognise this.
For further information and tickets for the RPS Awards at The Royal Northern College of Music on 5 March, PLEASE CLICK HERE
Header Image: The RPS Awards 2023. Image Mark Allen
