Music review: Prom 6: Nicola Benedetti, BBC NOW and Thomas Søndergård

On 20 July, Nicola Benedetti turned 30. She has just been made the youngest recipient for the Queen’s Medal for Music, and she has made it clear that there are other ways too in which she has reached a turning point. Most notably, she is starting to distance herself from the Sistema project which has seen her working with young people from housing estates in the most disadvantaged areas of Scotland. As she hinted to an interviewer last week, the problem with this scheme is that social-work aims can trump musical ones, and she’s not even sure that the former are achieving the hoped-for results.