Writing as I do just a few days away from a festival that genuinely looks as though it will happen, I have to express a degree of astonishment mixed with an enormous dose of gratitude to everyone involved, gratitude not least to a group of festival sponsors who have stuck with us and enabled us to press ahead with plans that, only recently, seemed so forlorn. But having also kept a group of performers on-side since the loss of their original dates in July, the fact that Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, MILOŠ, Mitsuko Uchida and Tasmin Little are about to grace the Petworth stage in person, I can only say that we have a long overdue and much needed feast of music making just around the corner. Beethoven will be celebrated as was always intended, the personally selected Steinway will resound to Mitsuko’s impeccable readings of Schubert, and Tasmin Little will at last complete a date she set aside for one of her special ‘retirement’ series of concerts. And of course that’s barely the start of it!
 
The journey in ensuring that we can indeed go online and do so with quality and in style is another story altogether, but all in all it’s remarkable and it’s about to happen.