Music Chat: My Three Most Mortifying Concert Moments
Vložit
- čas přidán 23. 11. 2023
- Silence is golden when attending sacred events, such as classical music concerts, but every so often decorum fails us and embarrassment ensues. Here are three of my most memorable (and mortifying) concert-going experiences, and I'd love to hear about yours. Don't tell me you don't have any!
Not a classical concert, but when I was a kid, I played the piano in a church talent show. One of the participants was a young lady whose singing was beyond dreadful. Total caterwauling. I tried to suppress laughter, which triggered my aunt, which triggered my father - who was literally squeezing his arthritic knuckles to keep from losing it. The stern looks of disapproval from everyone around us only made matters worse. Nobody talked to us afterward and my mother was mortified. I regret nothing.
At one concert I attended, Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto was the first half of the program. The Adagio began and all was quiet, hushed...and in the audience someone's cell phone rang...and the ring tone was "Fur Elise." The soloist stopped playing and there was a collective intake of breath on the part of the audience and muffled gasps. The offender, his phone glowing brightly in the dark, silenced it and sat expectantly. The movement began again. It was horrifying.
That second story sounds like a scene out of a Seinfeld episode.
I'm a police officer. I was off duty, watching Mahler's Fifth in my town's theatre, when an obviously drunk lady started talking loudly during one of the most silent sections of the symphony. The assistant conductor and I had to hug that lady and take her out of the room before the concert was interrupted. It was very unpleasant, especially because I missed the rest of the concert.
YES! There has never been a better post-Thanksgiving belly laugh than those three moments of mortification. Thank you for lifting up my day.
I enjoy stories of Dave's youthful hooliganism.
Strauss Four Last Songs, Dame Felicity Lott, BBCSO/Andrew Davis. Finishes the first song. Some nutcase up the front yells out 'CAN'T HEAR YA'. Audience gasps. Dame Felicity shoots him a death stare. Concert continues without further interruption.
My mortifying moment came after a performance of Don Giovanni in Staatoper Berlin. Musically sound (Barenboim was conducting) but the production was awful (Claus Guth was directing). During the applause there were ovarions for the singers, orchestra and conductor but catcalls and booing for the director. I made the mistake of booing and was shouted at by the guy sitting behind me: "It is strictly forbidden to boo in German opera houses!" I started to laugh and pointed to the other 1500 people booing. Then he stood up and shouted again: "This ist mein haus, gett the f__k out of here and never come back!" He turned out to be the indentant of the Staatsoper Berlin. P.s. I've been back, many times.
Back around 1990 or 1991 I attended a performance of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony with Gennadi Rozhdestvensky conducting onw of those long-named former Soviet orchestras at the National Auditorium in Madrid, Spain. I was seated in one of the choir seats behind the orchestra, so I saw the conductor's face. The 12 invasion variations, which he conducted mostly using his eyes, had me shedding tears rolling down both cheeks by the time the fourth or fifth variation kicked in. In the second movement, the Moderato (Poco Allgero), the guy seated to my left started scratching different body parts in sequence: left eyebrow, right shoulder, left elbow, right knee, vicinoity of the scrotum, and then back to the top again, maybe switching left and right. It was a severe case of OCD and it was as annoying as hell. I took out my concert entry ticket and my pen and I wrote ¿TIENE USTED PULGAS? (HAVE YOU GOT FLEAS?) and handed it to him. Man, was he pissed off. He got up and nerarly jumped over me and the two people to my right and sat in a free seat there. When the concert was over, he didn't wait for me at the door and I didn't wait for him. Several months later I saw him during the intermission of some Shostakovich string quartets played by the Borodin Quarter. I guess we both indulge in Shostakovich, but some of us are itchier than others.
Some years ago, I went on a date with a guy who decided he didn't like the melody of the second movement of Tchaikovsky's piano trio. So he hummed a different cadence he liked more. Multiple times. For 20 minutes. That was truly absolutely painful, and I was obviously associated with him as we were the only two people who weren't middle aged or older.
Many decades ago. Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Hatink conducting. I am about 14 years old. Sit in Orchestra row 19. My mother to my left. A stately gentleman to my right. To his right, the aisle. Opening piece: the premiere of a commissioned piece for narrator and orchestra in memory of Dutch soldiers and citizens fallen during WWII. Sometime into the piece, I nod off. Only to be woken up by applause. Haitink turns around facing the hall, bows, and then gestures with his right hand. In my direction. Pointing at me. I feel mortified: he knows I've been conducting Mahler at home, playing Haitinks tecordings and waving mom's knitting needle as a baton. I blush and turn red as a lobster.
I have two.
Many years ago when I was a poor student I went to my first opera at Covent Garden with a friend. We chose the cheapest tickets available (the dreadful 'slips'). We were unfamiliar with the building and found ourselves in the wrong queue. The attendant held our tickets at arm's length as if a bad smell was coming from them. He mumbled inaudibly and waved us away. I asked him to repeat, but he again mumbled something incomprehensible. A posh lady behind us snatched the tickets and squeaked 'Oh, you are in the wrong queue! You should be up there with the pigeons!'
About 20 years ago, while attending solo a concert at (then) Avery Fisher Hall, the first movement of Shostakovich's 15th Symphony (a favorite piece of mine, to which I'd excitedly looked forward) had begun and been underway for a minute or two, when I started to hear low talking right by me- and it wouldn't stop. I became quite internally irate, fretful, really - as I especially loved the music I was hearing, and had waited for this show- until after a couple minutes had passed, I realized, to my horror, that the discussion was coming from a tape recorder (remember: this was 20 years ago) in my backpack, which had somehow gone into play mode and was (albeit at a low volume during a very loud musical passage) going on and on and on. At that time, as part of training for my work, I had to record portions of clinical interviews for review.
I had an uncontrollable nosebleed during the first movement of Mahler 3... Then in another concert I sat next to a delightful older gentleman whose bowels betrayed him right after the downbeat... I will never forget it.
At a Seattle Symphony concert some years ago, a contemporary piece was receiving its local premiere. Its conclusion was long and quiet (rather like the final pages of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony). In the midst of this muted coda, a woman's cell phone went off in the balcony. The ring tone was the "Ode to Joy" theme from Beethoven's Ninth. (Where's your tie, Dave?) Unfortunately, her purse, in which the cell phone was nestled, was secured by velcro fasteners, so she had to noisily rip open several fasteners before getting to the phone to silence it. The ringtone only went up to the "Tochter aus Elysium" point before restarting, which it did, several times. The next piece on the program was Grieg's Piano Concerto, and most of the orchestra stayed in place while the stagehands moved the piano onstage. The two horn players, after obviously conferring about something for awhile, played (in perfect harmony) the next phrase of Beethoven's theme (up to "Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!") during the piano move, thus completing the tune that had so rudely ruined the end of the contemporary work. They received many laughs and a round of applause.
Thank you for sharing these stories. The third one made me laugh more than most stand-up comics I've seen.😂
At a concert with a bit of a wildcard friend. An old lady sits next to my friend. On or around remeberence day here in Canada. Orchestra tunes up, conductor announces a moment of scilence before the concert begins. 10 seconds into the perfect scilence and the old ladys stomach emits a loud rumble. Out of my peripheral vision I see my friend tense and silently shaking. The giggles spread to me, now also silently holding in laughter, shoulders bouncing up and down. Seconds pass. My friend eventually lets out a noise, and heads around the hall start turning towards us. I manage to keep it in and betray my friend by scowling at him. A lifetime later the scilence stops. The old lady is displeased and the concert is entirely forgettable.
I went to Johns Hopkins a few years before you did. During a concert from that time, the Baltimore Sun's reviewer, a fine teacher who was later the head of the Peabody Institute, was sitting a few rows in front of me at the Lyric Theater. He snored through through most of the concert, but somehow he came up with a positive review.
O had no part in this but was one of apparently a whole concert hall mortified.