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. The tall gentleman to my right looks and smiles at me. Then he rises, steps into the aisle, and makes his way to the podium to receive the orchestra's and audience' applause. I have fallen asleep next to the composer...
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!' Mortifying. Luckily my friend's wit was quicker than mine. 'Better to be up amongst the pigeons than beneath them, Madame.'
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.
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.
I have two. Several years ago, I participated in a cello festival in one of the most prestigious concert halls here in Denmark, together with some of the best celloteachers from all over Europe and their students from ranging 4-year old prodigies to conservatory students. Before the last concert with all the teachers and students playing together in a big cello-orchestra, we've had (quite disgusting) lunch. And during a break between two pieces a little boy in the orchestra stands up and shouts: "*conductor's name*! *poor kid's name* has vomitted!" So all these great teachers and conservatory professors had to rush to clean all the vomit from the floor of one of Denmark's most prestigious halls during the concert. Luckily there was very few people in the audience. Another one was when we in my semiprofessional orchestra Sibelius's Violin Concerto with a young hot-shot soloist. After the first cadenza in the first movement an audience member's phone rang and of course ruined all of the atmosphere in the movement in addition to annoy us all of course. But the phone continued ringing FOR THE ENTIRE MOVEMENT!!! My friends in the audience said, I had never looked so angry during a concert. After the first movement/horrorshow, the orchestra's administrative leader in the audience got up and half asked kindly, half shouted for the phone to be stopped immediately. There followed that awkward moment when you can hear a ringing phone be taken up of a bag and diddled with, before it eventually stopped. It happend to be an old lady, who apparantly couldn't even hear her phone, let alone the orchestra, i presume. So much for atmosphere.
Loved and had a great laugh with the jujubees story! Spring '78, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, L.A. Music Center. Horowitz has just finished thrilling the audience with his Carmen transcriiption, I go down to the foot of the stage to join in wildly applauding him. Who should be to my immediate right but Martha Argerich........I have accidentally stepped on her purse. A short itme later I attend her recital, tell her what happened, and ask if anything was damaged. She assured me I hadn't.
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.
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.
I have a fear about public performances of Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade,Decades ago the Philharmonia Orchestra under Nicholas Braithwaite gave a performance in Nottingham UK.All over a sudden a young man got up with (I assume) an epileptic fit and the next time was 40 miles away by the BBC Philharmonic (in those days the Northern Symphony) under Raymond Leppard something similar happened right at the end which is very quiet.He got up roared and dropped to the ground so I am always wary about this work
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.
And unluckily for me, the one and only time a joined with a group of hooligans TP-ing a house in the neighborhood, a police car happened to drive by within 10 seconds and catch us all in the act.@@leestamm3187
I remember some 15 years ago a performance of Turangalila (Brno Philharmony) slightly devastated by many ambulances honking around the theater, interfering with ondes Martenot.
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.
Hi David i was feeling low today but this video made me smile 😂 it is embarrassing when a coughing fit starts and you are in the middle of a row of seats and you can't get out and at classical concerts the audience give you the look of death
One of the great evenings of my concert-going life was the recital Rubinstein' gave during his final tour (1975-76). Though macular degeneration meant he was playing with mostly just peripheral vision, he still produced 2 hours of gorgeous music, passionate and lyrical by turns, in particular a Schumann Fantasiestucke that was one of the most poetic I'll ever hear. After it all, he offered one encore and was walking out to another wave of applause to give another, when we saw this woman sort of weaving down the aisle, half waving, and shouting something through the din of clapping. When it subsided, you could hear her clearly bellowing out, ""Play 'Song of India'. Play 'Song of India'." We all shrank in our seats, Rubinstein looked down into the dark trying to discern the source of the sound, and an usher RACED down to where she was standing, grabbed her by the arm (still pleading for 'Song of India'), and positively RAN her up the aisle. At which point the audience applauded, Rubinstein smiled, and then he tore into his tried and true encore, "The Ritual Fire Dance." We never did hear 'Song of India' that night, but I'll never forget the request.
Horowitz recital, Ambassador Auditorium Pasadena, Ca. '76, I think. After last piece an older gentleman wants to go backstage and ask him to play Henselt's "Si Oiseau J'Etais" (Etude in F#, Op.2 #6). He never made it, nor did he recruit any of those around him to do so either.
I was at a concert, the Battle of Ice of Alexander Nevsky just started, still at the relatively silent part of the build-up, when the left side of the choir stand collapsed and one third of the choir just disappeared. The conductor was cold as ice and continued without any interruption.
March 1985. The Barbican Centre in London. It's Sir Charles Groves' 70th birthday, and he is conducting the London Symphony in THE NINTH with Donald McIntyre as the baritone soloist. The performance goes quite well for three movements. Then comes the loud, dissonant introduction to the finale, after which McIntyre stands up and sings, "O Fr---" then stops and sits down again. I can't help but laugh hysterically, simultaneously covering my mouth so I look like I'm having a seizure. My date doesn't know the reason for this and it seems that most of audience doesn't either. I catch my breath and whisper to my date, "He came in too early!" still chuckling. At the end of the performance, Groves gives McIntyre a forgiving pat on the shoulder. Now, every time I am at a performance of THE NINTH, after that intro to the finale, I say to myself, "Wait! Wait! It's not time yet!"
In Vancouver, at a live CBC Radio World Premiere of a new choral work by Louis Andriessen, (with the composer conducting) my friend and I could not stop laughing soon after the performance began, and immediately left with embarrassment. We were apprehensive that his music was going to be modernist whoops and squeaks (which it was), and were hoping for something more like Glass or Reich. And we shouldn't have smoked a joint before hand!
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 haven’t listened to the Ozawa/BSO recording of Schoenberg’s GURRELIEDER since I discovered your channel three years ago. That said, I’ve just taken it off the shelf and plan to listen again soon, in hopes of hearing your cough! Meanwhile, good sir, Happy Holidays!
My musical moment was perhaps more cringeworthy than it was mortifying, but it still qualifies, I think. It was a January 2018 concert by Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra that was part of a weeklong series of performances featuring all six Tchaikovsky symphonies plus a number of Tchaikovsky’s “greatest hits.” For this Wednesday matinee concert Vanska strategically placed the Third Symphony (“Polish”) before the intermission, perhaps figuring that this way he wouldn’t lose some of the “blue hairs” during the intermission, since afterwards he was presenting extended excerpts from “Swan Lake” which is surely what most people in the audience had come to see. We were sitting in one of the side balcony sections which have six chairs placed in a line facing the stage, all on one level. Our seats were toward the rear of the section, meaning that we had to “see through” the line of other people sitting in the section to view the stage. Well, one of the people in front of us decided to “air conduct” the entire Third Symphony - using his index finger to wiggle his way through every note and phrase of every movement of the piece - Valery Gerghiev “toothpick style.” His hand and index finger were raised just high enough to be in our exact line of vision - I suspect to prove to the people around him that he knew every note of Tchaikovsky’s least-known symphony. It was so distracting that I ended up closing my eyes for nearly the entire performance. And at the end we bolted from the section and high-tailed it over to the opposite side of the auditorium. I have no idea if the guy decided to air-conduct the “Swan Lake” excerpts as well, but I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
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.
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.
I had a date with a guy who had a foot fetish and spent the entire time staring under the table looking at my shoes. I thought he'd dropped his wallet or something.
My most horrifying experience was showing up to a performance without my music. It was a children’s concert, so the music was familiar, but still. I played from scores, trombone bell propped on the knee so I could turn pages. Another horrifying experience: Renee Fleming was our guest, and was singing an aria when my phone began dinging with a message thread! As luck would have it, the my msg. tone fit the chord progression. But I got lots of ribbing from the players around me later.
O had no part in this but was one of apparently a whole concert hall mortified. Back in the 1980ies, there was a concert by the excellent Bundesjugendorchester (Federal Youth Orchestra) in my hometown in which they were to play the Sacre. We had an ambitious school orchestra, several string players of which played in the BJO as well, so many of us went to hear them. Two of our most gifted and most smart but also most mischevious members apparently had a bet running about who would deliver the first "Bravo" after the Sacre. Well, the ending came, the woodwinds played there little upwards doodle, one of them called out "Bravo!", and then the final blow fell. In directing it, the conductor had already turned halfway in the perpetrator's direction.
Having snagged a front row seat at a Radu Lupu recital at Oberlin College, I sat in rapt silence (along with all 2,000 others), listening to this master probe the silence of a Schubert adagio when a large piece of white ceiling material became dislodged and floated gently down to the stage, brightly reflecting. With everyone's eyes on it, the piece of fluff made a last-minute turn and landed on my nose...
Here's my mortifying moment. I was conducting the St. John's College Orchestra, a very tiny and make-shift ensemble, in Annapolis. Our big piece was a clarinet concerto by Weber, with an incredibly beautiful slow second movement. That movement opens with three French horns slowly stepping through accompaniment as the clarinet plays on top. While the outer movements were challenging, that middle movement was our secret weapon--always sounded beautiful and really felt good to play. Alas! Our audience did not hear that beautiful second movement. Our horn #1, a hired community member with experience in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, was so skilled that he never printed out a transposed part; he just sight-transposed at every rehearsal with ease. (You know where this is going...) Well, on the night of the concert, I breathed deeply as the ensemble turned pages and prepared for the second movement. I gave two preparation beats, one, two, and-- YIKES. Not a beautiful major triad, but a third, fifth, and a FOURTH. Imagine the competing disspnances. I began sweating before the measure even ended, and it only got worse. This player was so focused that, despite looking at me and my frantic pleas, I don't think he realized that HE was the source of the cacophony. The poor clarinetist and strings joined, all of us praying that the fire alarm or some similar emergency would intervene and put our torture to an end. But it did not. We finished the second movement the same way he began it, and afterwards, when I asked this horn player what had happened, he was stunned--he apparently totally forgot that he had been transposing the music and just played the notes in front of him. So, a lesson: no matter what your players say, give them the right music. There are so many variables in a single performance; don't add any more than necessary!
Conductor Gianmaria Griglio said something about horse out of control on outside concert. Or during Janáček Opera some fog device was going closer and closer from stage to orchestra and audience.
The jujube story was a riot! But look on the bright side - that lady got half a box of free candy. Then again, it was probably coated with hairspray. 🍡
I went to a ballet performance in the seventies. I was 22 or 23 and in the ballet it was a very beautiful young woman that I fall in love with. It was a modern ballet and in one scene she showed a bit more of herself than they normally do on stage. I was of course very taken, young as I was, so I wrote her a fan letter. very embarrassing to think about today. Well, of course I bought a ticket for the next performance, and I remember the wondering expression in the face of the lady in the ticket booth, when I asked for a ticket at the fron row. In the middlle of the front row. Well there I was. The only person at the front row. I was getting more and more nervous, noticing all the seats behind me were filled with people, but no one in the front row except me. And in the middle of the row. Everyone could se me. I just wanted to disappear. It felt that everyone was looking at the strange lonely guy in the front row and wondering what he was doing there. And of course the young dancer must realize that I was the lunetic that wrote the letter. I couldn't relax and enjoy one second of the show. I just wanted to die. Constantly red in the face. What the lady in the ticket both didn't tell me, was the you don't take a seat in the front row when going on a ballet performance, because the dancers are swetting and it might splash on you. A very painful memory.
Fortunately, my mortifying moment took place at intermission and not while music was in progress, at a Gonfalone subscription concert at the Chiesa di Sant'Agnese in Agone in Rome, in April 1991. When the first half of the Vivaldi concert was over, we began to applaud, and, one leg of my chair slid off the edge of an altar pedestal, and the chair and I sailed onto a pile of candles in a wall crevice. The chair and I had to be pulled out by the legs, and everyone was relieved that I emerged alive and unharmed. For months afterward, people who saw me in Ricordi music stores and other locations around the city would smile and whisper to their friends what had happened to me. So I achieved a brief notoriety, which is a genuine form of fame, in the eternal city.
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.
I'm embarrassed that after following your writing and videos for the past year I am only NOW learning that you got one of your degrees at Hopkins! I finished my musicology masters at Peabody and loved being around so much music. And I am very grateful that I was able to catch so many incredible BSO concerts with Marin Alsop before she left. Although there were plenty of mortifyinf moments in that hall, especially when we students rushed in with last-minute tickets... 😁 Nowadays it seems like the Shriver series is pulling most of the musical weight in Baltimore while the BSO gets its sea legs under its new conductor.
Ok, I'll volunteer. In my freshman year of undergrad, the week before classes began, I attended, with the others in the percussion studio, a solo recital given by a recent graduate. The program featured one work, a personal "realization" of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonata for solo percussion, featuring a vast array of percussion instruments surrounding the performer, complete with toy piano and mounted, distorted electric guitar, and other oddities. (The studio itself, it must be remarked, had a pervasive culture of celebrating avant-garde and unusual repertoire above all else, which was a total culture shock, coming from a very conservative high school music program.) The work itself was interesting, but interminable. The electric guitar sound, hooked up to a laptop and amplifier, was played at a decibel that would give an airplane a run for its money (I wore earplugs the entire concert). We were nearing the end of the work, with all of us in the audience feeling quite spent. The performer had just played a cataclysmic guitar chord, which slowly had reverberated out to nothingness. What followed was the one moment of prolonged, powerful silence in the work. Or at least, it would've been, had I not accidentally let loose the loudest fart at that moment. The other audience members, admirably, tried their hardest to suppress laughter as the performer clunked out a coda on the toy piano, but it was too late. By the end of the piece, everyone in the audience had begun to laugh, including me, while I held my head in shame. Even the performer had noticed the, uh, change in the air among the audience. A year later, I happened upon the same fellow at a local college party, who jokingly confronts me with: "are you the motherfucker that farted during my concert that one time?" Good times.
Yours are enough for everyone, Dave! Goodness me! I've had nothing at all, only an old fella who erupted in conducting orgasm during a Haydn symphony at The Anvil, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England. My home town. It was awesome, he really loved that moment!
I went to Peabody in Baltimore, and I used to sub and play extra trombone with the Balt Symphony with Commisiona at the Lyric. Back in the day. Maybe you heard me.
I lived in Baltimore during Commissiona's time there. One big concert I hoped I'd love was his performance of Gurre-Lieder, but as it turned out, from my seat in the first balcony none of ANY of the soloists could be heard above the orchestra. The musicians sounded GREAT, the chorus pretty good, but the solo voices? I have no idea!
As an orchestral instrumentalist under semi-auspicious circumstances, I was mortified due to my unintentional solo. During a moment of silence in anticipation of a tutti chord, I miscounted and played my note one beat ahead of everyone else. As Homer Simpson once said, "Monorail!"
I went to a New York Philharmonic concert where Bernhard Klee was conducting Mahler's 1st. During one of the middle movements, I suffered an excruciating attack of gas. I never should have gone to Tad's Steakhouse beforehand.
I went to Mahler 8 one time in the concertgebouw with a friend and just as the first movement finishes with those choral arpeggios my friend wanted to shift in his seat. Problem is that the seats are absolutely terrible and you don’t have a lot of space. Well the music stops and everyone is impressed and attentively quiet when my friend tried to shift again, but then his foot slipped really hard over the polished wooden floor which made a huge noise that sounded almost exactly like a thunderous fart.. you could feel the tension shifting to us with baffled faces and me trying not to die from holding my laugh in and him having his face red as a beet. What happened in that time span is a bit of a blur to me now, but it felt like they waited a solid 10 minutes until they started part 2..
In April of 2014, Leif Segerstam conducting Mahler 9 with the Turku Philharmonic, Finland. During the very last page of the finale, when everything is dying down, quiet as can be, all of a sudden, from a few rows back, someone apparently falls off their seat (Maybe fell asleep?) And then start howling in pain for a couple seconds, Segerstam turns around and looks into the audience, some people help the poor fallen person out of the hall, and Leif turns around again, and continues conducting, right where he left the note "hanging"... It was a very jarring moment, in such a serene and quiet part of that wonderful finale!
In the early 1980s I attended a concert at The Royal Festival Hall London where Aaron Copland was conducting his own 80th Birthday Concert. One of the pieces performed was Copland's own Quiet City. Unfortunately, just after the piece started a quite loud and repetitive striking noise started and continued throughout the piece. Copland conducting the piece remained oblivious to the noise, despite the fact that a couple in the audience stood up and tried to draw his attention to the problem. At the end Copland and soloist walked off the stage still apparently unaware. This marked the half way point of the concert. During the interval the problem was corrected. Apparently, one of the sound sensors in the ceiling of the hall had malfunctioned. Copland was informed of the earlier problem, and repeated Quiet City, this time undisturbed.
This wasn’t mortifying but it was pretty funny - I was at a concert in Dublin where a youth orchestra was playing Tchaikovsky’s 5th. Towards the end of the second movement during the brief pause after the trumpets come roaring in with the motto theme everyone erupted into applause thinking the movement was over. It wasn’t just a few people, it was the entire hall (The audience was almost entirely friends and family of the young musicians). It took a few seconds for people to stop clapping because nobody could tell the music was still going because you couldn’t hear the clarinets that come in aftarwards. There was no clapping after the third movement, and people were hesitant to clap after the fourth. Maybe you could share some of the funniest things you’ve witnessed at a concert?
Dave, I went to a performance of the Emerson string quartet final tour, and this gentleman behind me told his friends that Shostakovich was essentially American. His friends all went, oh, how interesting! And I've been dying to ask you and your lovely listeners... Does anyone know what he's talking about? It kind of tainted it for me because I'm sitting there thinking, didn't he get an award from Lenin? Anyway, I am a fairly new concert goer. Thank you for giving me the courage to get out of my shell and just go ❤
Well, last year there was a performance of Wojciech Kilar's "Krzesany" by the Cracow Phil under Antoni Wit. The piece requiers noisy folk-like percussion for the cheerful finale which is often performed by a group children (it's an ad libitum part so they can have some fun). And so it was at that evening. But during the last forte before the finale one of the kids has fainted on stage due to schrieckieng sound of fortissimo brass. There was some chaos around and four adults from the audience grabbed the poor kid like a coffin and took him out of the hall. But the orchestra kept playing. In that exact moment the mood of the piece changed to a funeral one so it looked like a funeral procession! After all the kid was all right but the accident was so in pair with the music that it had a truly mortifying impression...
2021. Zubin Mehta conducted Belgrade philharmonic in Belgrade. Shortly before the beginning of the concert, one of the big lighting lamps fell directly on stage where musicians were siting. Thank God, they reacted quickly (i don't know how) but it could have ended tragically.
I was watching a performance of Shostakovich's 8th with the RPO and Vasily Petrenko conducting. It was in the Royal Festival Hall and I was naturally really excited to see Petrenko doing Shostakovich, but it was in the second half and they don't check the tickets for reentry, so an unsavoury group of about four or five men came to free ride in a few of the empty seats in the balcony. They seemed to take a sadistic joy in being disruptive. All through the first two movements they were there talking, crackling their plastic cups deliberately loudly then giggling about it. People were giving them dirty looks, it didn't help. I think the group got bored and left. Still a great performance and I'm happy I saw it live because I love that symphony now, but it was excruciatingly frustrating, especially in that first movement.
Once I fell asleep during bach c minor mass and my friend that came to me did as well. We were both in a very sleep deprived time. But a singer friend of mine told us that the singers were so bad she had to leave (those proud singers...) so maybe we didnt miss much
My daughter was, on my recommendation, attending a performance of Crumb’s “Black Angels.” During a quiet section,her phone went off, even though she had silenced it before the start of the performance. She frantically tried to shut it off, to no avail. As it turned out, the “find my phone” app had somehow been activated (inexplicably). It took a long time to resolve. To make matters worse, she was well-known to the quartet as she had been taught and coached by all of them! I don’t think she’s gotten over it yet.
I have a Woolsey Hall story too. The New Haven Symphony, in 1991, Mahler's Fourth. At the very beginning of the final movement, one of the elderly folks who used to get bussed in for the concerts, fell asleep and proceeded to loudly snore through the entire movement. I mean, buzzsaw loud. The acoustics at Woolsey are really lively, so the sound of that honker was just bouncing and echoing off the walls. It was equal parts horrifying and utterly hilarious. But on balance, it was downright awful. Keep in mind, the orchestra only used to play about four or five programs a season - and they would only get one performance of every program - and their one crack at it was always on a Tuesday night in New Haven! (Talk about a thankless task!) - and their whole performance was wrecked. It was clear that they had worked very hard on the piece, and the performance was quite good - but then it just got demolished. I felt really, really bad for the soprano. Here she snagged a gig to sing Mahler, and zzzzzzz. I hope she laughs about it now. The weirdest part to me was - nobody even nudged the guy or tried to rouse him. Everyone in his immediate vicinity just ignored him like nothing was happening.
I have several. Most memorably, the ENTIRE audience was mortified at a Chicago Symphony concert in the early 2000's, when a world-famous Russian guest conductor and his piano soloist/wife were performing the Strauss Burleske. I was following the score, and she (the soloist) mistakenly jumped ahead several pages. The Maestro immediately turned to her, then clutched his own chest and slumped over towards the podium. The soloist/wife gracefully...seamlessly glided off the piano bench to her husband, and gently led him, as he shuffled off the stage. The entire audience (and the orchestra) was stunned. Henry Fogel then appeared on stage, informing us that the house doctor was examining the stricken maestro, and the intermission would now begin. We were all to "hang loose" to see if, in fact, the maestro would be able to conduct the second half of the concert. Boy, did he EVER. He LEAPT to the podium with the grace of a gazelle, and launched into (I believe) the Skyscrapers ballet by John Alden Carpenter, after which both he and his wife performed a little 10-movement suite by Schnittke, which involved lots of comic bits between them at the piano (with metronomes, etc). They were like two kids, enjoying the hell out of it. We, the audience, were relieved and hugely entertained...but some of us felt that the onstage Schnittke "routine" between the maestro and his wife had actually been the LESSER of their two theatrical events that night. LR
@@gerontius3 I only know Anusov from his Lt Kije Suite, which was the filler on the powerhouse 1961 LP recording of his son's Prokofiev Third Sym from 1961. I'll check the Francesca. And, yes, I suppose one could look back and see the humorous aspects of the CSO concert hi-jinx I describe above......
My quartet and I (all of us high school aged musicians) went to see (coincidentally enough) Shostakovich 5 in Chicago with Honeck in November of last year, and we had one violinist who was always completely unaware of how much noise she made. Being November (and we also took the train and walked a mile in the blistering cold of Chicago), her nose was understandably quite runny. But how she dealt with it was certainly less understandable. She sniveled the loudest I have ever heard anyone snivel in the largo (it’s always the largo) and it was like WTF… but whatever.
Another Baltimore story...when I first became fanatical about classical music, I used to feel self-righteous indignation at the cretins who would thoughtlessly ruin a musical experience by creating some kind of noise distraction during concerts. Whether it was narcissistic need to talk during a performance or some kind of beeping devices (this was pre-cellphone days), I would get extremely irate internally and rage that my experience was being tarnished. After all, the very essence we were there to take in was sound, so distractions I viewed as a major sin! A few years went by, and there was a particular instance where I attended a senior guitar recital at Peabody in their smaller hall. He's playing a Sor sonata, when suddenly I hear some kind of electronic beeping, and it doesn't stop. I was flabbergasted and sorry for the performer whose senior recital had to be impacted by some awkward numbskull who clearly doesn't value this kind of thing. I go from anger to shame when I realize after a few seconds that IT WAS MY OWN DEVICE, something I had just acquired to try to clean up the mess of my life. I turned it off as quickly as I could, although it was a new device so it wasn't clear exactly how to shut it off. I heaped the opprobrium on myself that I deserved...then realized how ridiculously random life could be. I talked with the performer afterward and he chuckled about it, didn't let it ruin his day. I was able to learn to be more forgiving of others because of that moment.
There was a concert at New York's Merkin Concert Hall showcasing various marimba players and works written for them. One of the performers started to play the most vulgar, pretentious, audience baiting and stupid pieces of music I've ever heard in my life. I was sitting with a fellow musician friend, and we could't help but laugh and snicker during the performance, and we passed snide notes back and forth. The piece finished, and sitting right behind us was the composer, who duly reprimanded us! Another unforgettable incident was at the New York premier of George Rochberg's String Quartets 4, 5 & 6. I was sitting with two composer friends of mine, and at the very moment the concert ended and the applause started, one of my friends stood up and at the top of his voice yelled "Boo! Fraud" over and over again. Cringe worthy!
The jujube story is hilarious! As teenage music students in Australia, we dutifully used to go to free orchestral concerts of the latest Australian contemporary music, which was often terrible. It was mostly of the 'tinkle and fart' variety. The studio where the concerts were held had seats that were ganged together, and it would only take a fart from the trombone or similar, to set one of us off, and slowly the whole row of seats would be shaking uncontrollably! Even if someone down the other end of the row got the giggles, we would get it too!
@@DavesClassicalGuide Haha well if some are still around now you can't be sure about that anymore. Great video by the way, I'm all for more of this type.
I took a date to Mahler 1, which received a glorious performance. But at the "Jewish Wedding" music in the slow movement, both of us were consumed with laughter because it was so "on point". Very embarrassing.
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.
The tall gentleman to my right looks and smiles at me. Then he rises, steps into the aisle, and makes his way to the podium to receive the orchestra's and audience' applause.
I have fallen asleep next to the composer...
Ahahahahahah fantastic story
God, that must have been mortifying! 😴
Doesn’t get any better than that!
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!'
Mortifying.
Luckily my friend's wit was quicker than mine. 'Better to be up amongst the pigeons than beneath them, Madame.'
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.
That just sucks, but I'm sure the rest of the audience was grateful!
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.
I have two.
Several years ago, I participated in a cello festival in one of the most prestigious concert halls here in Denmark, together with some of the best celloteachers from all over Europe and their students from ranging 4-year old prodigies to conservatory students. Before the last concert with all the teachers and students playing together in a big cello-orchestra, we've had (quite disgusting) lunch. And during a break between two pieces a little boy in the orchestra stands up and shouts: "*conductor's name*! *poor kid's name* has vomitted!" So all these great teachers and conservatory professors had to rush to clean all the vomit from the floor of one of Denmark's most prestigious halls during the concert. Luckily there was very few people in the audience.
Another one was when we in my semiprofessional orchestra Sibelius's Violin Concerto with a young hot-shot soloist. After the first cadenza in the first movement an audience member's phone rang and of course ruined all of the atmosphere in the movement in addition to annoy us all of course. But the phone continued ringing FOR THE ENTIRE MOVEMENT!!! My friends in the audience said, I had never looked so angry during a concert. After the first movement/horrorshow, the orchestra's administrative leader in the audience got up and half asked kindly, half shouted for the phone to be stopped immediately. There followed that awkward moment when you can hear a ringing phone be taken up of a bag and diddled with, before it eventually stopped. It happend to be an old lady, who apparantly couldn't even hear her phone, let alone the orchestra, i presume. So much for atmosphere.
Loved and had a great laugh with the jujubees story!
Spring '78, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, L.A. Music Center. Horowitz has just finished thrilling the audience with his Carmen transcriiption, I go down to the foot of the stage to join in wildly applauding him. Who should be to my immediate right but Martha Argerich........I have accidentally stepped on her purse. A short itme later I attend her recital, tell her what happened, and ask if anything was damaged. She assured me I hadn't.
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.😂
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.
Good for you!
I have a fear about public performances of Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade,Decades ago the Philharmonia Orchestra under Nicholas Braithwaite gave a performance in Nottingham UK.All over a sudden a young man got up with (I assume) an epileptic fit and the next time was 40 miles away by the BBC Philharmonic (in those days the Northern Symphony) under Raymond Leppard something similar happened right at the end which is very quiet.He got up roared and dropped to the ground so I am always wary about this work
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.
I enjoy stories of Dave's youthful hooliganism.
One's youth is not complete without some hooliganism.
And unluckily for me, the one and only time a joined with a group of hooligans TP-ing a house in the neighborhood, a police car happened to drive by within 10 seconds and catch us all in the act.@@leestamm3187
So true.
I remember some 15 years ago a performance of Turangalila (Brno Philharmony) slightly devastated by many ambulances honking around the theater, interfering with ondes Martenot.
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.
Oh, God!
Hi David i was feeling low today but this video made me smile 😂 it is embarrassing when a coughing fit starts and you are in the middle of a row of seats and you can't get out and at classical concerts the audience give you the look of death
Feel better!
One of the great evenings of my concert-going life was the recital Rubinstein' gave during his final tour (1975-76). Though macular degeneration meant he was playing with mostly just peripheral vision, he still produced 2 hours of gorgeous music, passionate and lyrical by turns, in particular a Schumann Fantasiestucke that was one of the most poetic I'll ever hear. After it all, he offered one encore and was walking out to another wave of applause to give another, when we saw this woman sort of weaving down the aisle, half waving, and shouting something through the din of clapping. When it subsided, you could hear her clearly bellowing out, ""Play 'Song of India'. Play 'Song of India'." We all shrank in our seats, Rubinstein looked down into the dark trying to discern the source of the sound, and an usher RACED down to where she was standing, grabbed her by the arm (still pleading for 'Song of India'), and positively RAN her up the aisle. At which point the audience applauded, Rubinstein smiled, and then he tore into his tried and true encore, "The Ritual Fire Dance." We never did hear 'Song of India' that night, but I'll never forget the request.
"Play Free Bird!"
Horowitz recital, Ambassador Auditorium Pasadena, Ca. '76, I think. After last piece an older gentleman wants to go backstage and ask him to play Henselt's "Si Oiseau J'Etais" (Etude in F#, Op.2 #6). He never made it, nor did he recruit any of those around him to do so either.
I was at a concert, the Battle of Ice of Alexander Nevsky just started, still at the relatively silent part of the build-up, when the left side of the choir stand collapsed and one third of the choir just disappeared. The conductor was cold as ice and continued without any interruption.
March 1985. The Barbican Centre in London. It's Sir Charles Groves' 70th birthday, and he is conducting the London Symphony in THE NINTH with Donald McIntyre as the baritone soloist. The performance goes quite well for three movements. Then comes the loud, dissonant introduction to the finale, after which McIntyre stands up and sings, "O Fr---" then stops and sits down again. I can't help but laugh hysterically, simultaneously covering my mouth so I look like I'm having a seizure. My date doesn't know the reason for this and it seems that most of audience doesn't either. I catch my breath and whisper to my date, "He came in too early!" still chuckling. At the end of the performance, Groves gives McIntyre a forgiving pat on the shoulder. Now, every time I am at a performance of THE NINTH, after that intro to the finale, I say to myself, "Wait! Wait! It's not time yet!"
YES! There has never been a better post-Thanksgiving belly laugh than those three moments of mortification. Thank you for lifting up my day.
In Vancouver, at a live CBC Radio World Premiere of a new choral work by Louis Andriessen, (with the composer conducting) my friend and I could not stop laughing soon after the performance began, and immediately left with embarrassment. We were apprehensive that his music was going to be modernist whoops and squeaks (which it was), and were hoping for something more like Glass or Reich. And we shouldn't have smoked a joint before hand!
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 haven’t listened to the Ozawa/BSO recording of Schoenberg’s GURRELIEDER since I discovered your channel three years ago. That said, I’ve just taken it off the shelf and plan to listen again soon, in hopes of hearing your cough! Meanwhile, good sir, Happy Holidays!
Spectacular recording, part 1 especially.
My musical moment was perhaps more cringeworthy than it was mortifying, but it still qualifies, I think. It was a January 2018 concert by Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra that was part of a weeklong series of performances featuring all six Tchaikovsky symphonies plus a number of Tchaikovsky’s “greatest hits.” For this Wednesday matinee concert Vanska strategically placed the Third Symphony (“Polish”) before the intermission, perhaps figuring that this way he wouldn’t lose some of the “blue hairs” during the intermission, since afterwards he was presenting extended excerpts from “Swan Lake” which is surely what most people in the audience had come to see.
We were sitting in one of the side balcony sections which have six chairs placed in a line facing the stage, all on one level. Our seats were toward the rear of the section, meaning that we had to “see through” the line of other people sitting in the section to view the stage. Well, one of the people in front of us decided to “air conduct” the entire Third Symphony - using his index finger to wiggle his way through every note and phrase of every movement of the piece - Valery Gerghiev “toothpick style.” His hand and index finger were raised just high enough to be in our exact line of vision - I suspect to prove to the people around him that he knew every note of Tchaikovsky’s least-known symphony. It was so distracting that I ended up closing my eyes for nearly the entire performance. And at the end we bolted from the section and high-tailed it over to the opposite side of the auditorium. I have no idea if the guy decided to air-conduct the “Swan Lake” excerpts as well, but I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
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.
The moral of that story: Always turn your phone off before a concert.
The jujube story reminds me of the Robert Burns poem about the louse.
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.
I had a date with a guy who had a foot fetish and spent the entire time staring under the table looking at my shoes. I thought he'd dropped his wallet or something.
My most horrifying experience was showing up to a performance without my music. It was a children’s concert, so the music was familiar, but still. I played from scores, trombone bell propped on the knee so I could turn pages.
Another horrifying experience: Renee Fleming was our guest, and was singing an aria when my phone began dinging with a message thread! As luck would have it, the my msg. tone fit the chord progression. But I got lots of ribbing from the players around me later.
The coughing story reminds me of the infamous performance of Tristan where Jon Vickers yelled “ Shut up with your damn coughing!”
O had no part in this but was one of apparently a whole concert hall mortified.
Back in the 1980ies, there was a concert by the excellent Bundesjugendorchester (Federal Youth Orchestra) in my hometown in which they were to play the Sacre. We had an ambitious school orchestra, several string players of which played in the BJO as well, so many of us went to hear them. Two of our most gifted and most smart but also most mischevious members apparently had a bet running about who would deliver the first "Bravo" after the Sacre. Well, the ending came, the woodwinds played there little upwards doodle, one of them called out "Bravo!", and then the final blow fell. In directing it, the conductor had already turned halfway in the perpetrator's direction.
Having snagged a front row seat at a Radu Lupu recital at Oberlin College, I sat in rapt silence (along with all 2,000 others), listening to this master probe the silence of a Schubert adagio when a large piece of white ceiling material became dislodged and floated gently down to the stage, brightly reflecting. With everyone's eyes on it, the piece of fluff made a last-minute turn and landed on my nose...
Here's my mortifying moment. I was conducting the St. John's College Orchestra, a very tiny and make-shift ensemble, in Annapolis. Our big piece was a clarinet concerto by Weber, with an incredibly beautiful slow second movement. That movement opens with three French horns slowly stepping through accompaniment as the clarinet plays on top. While the outer movements were challenging, that middle movement was our secret weapon--always sounded beautiful and really felt good to play.
Alas! Our audience did not hear that beautiful second movement. Our horn #1, a hired community member with experience in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, was so skilled that he never printed out a transposed part; he just sight-transposed at every rehearsal with ease. (You know where this is going...) Well, on the night of the concert, I breathed deeply as the ensemble turned pages and prepared for the second movement. I gave two preparation beats, one, two, and-- YIKES. Not a beautiful major triad, but a third, fifth, and a FOURTH. Imagine the competing disspnances. I began sweating before the measure even ended, and it only got worse. This player was so focused that, despite looking at me and my frantic pleas, I don't think he realized that HE was the source of the cacophony. The poor clarinetist and strings joined, all of us praying that the fire alarm or some similar emergency would intervene and put our torture to an end. But it did not. We finished the second movement the same way he began it, and afterwards, when I asked this horn player what had happened, he was stunned--he apparently totally forgot that he had been transposing the music and just played the notes in front of him.
So, a lesson: no matter what your players say, give them the right music. There are so many variables in a single performance; don't add any more than necessary!
Conductor Gianmaria Griglio said something about horse out of control on outside concert.
Or during Janáček Opera some fog device was going closer and closer from stage to orchestra and audience.
Hilarious...it takes quite a bit to get me to laugh at 0630 on a Saturday morning here in Auckland, New Zealand. But you did it!
Yay! Have a great day.
The jujube story was a riot! But look on the bright side - that lady got half a box of free candy. Then again, it was probably coated with hairspray. 🍡
I went to a ballet performance in the seventies. I was 22 or 23 and in the ballet it was a very beautiful young woman that I fall in love with. It was a modern ballet and in one scene she showed a bit more of herself than they normally do on stage.
I was of course very taken, young as I was, so I wrote her a fan letter. very embarrassing to think about today.
Well, of course I bought a ticket for the next performance, and I remember
the wondering expression in the face of the lady in the ticket booth, when I asked for a ticket at the fron row. In the middlle of the front row.
Well there I was. The only person at the front row. I was getting more and more nervous, noticing all the seats behind me were filled with people, but no one in the front row except me. And in the middle of the row. Everyone could se me.
I just wanted to disappear. It felt that everyone was looking at the strange lonely guy in the front row and wondering what he was doing there.
And of course the young dancer must realize that I was the lunetic that wrote the letter. I couldn't relax and enjoy one second of the show. I just wanted to die. Constantly red in the face.
What the lady in the ticket both didn't tell me, was the you don't take a seat in the front row when going on a ballet performance, because the dancers are swetting and it might splash on you.
A very painful memory.
Fortunately, my mortifying moment took place at intermission and not while music was in progress, at a Gonfalone subscription concert at the Chiesa di Sant'Agnese in Agone in Rome, in April 1991. When the first half of the Vivaldi concert was over, we began to applaud, and, one leg of my chair slid off the edge of an altar pedestal, and the chair and I sailed onto a pile of candles in a wall crevice. The chair and I had to be pulled out by the legs, and everyone was relieved that I emerged alive and unharmed. For months afterward, people who saw me in Ricordi music stores and other locations around the city would smile and whisper to their friends what had happened to me. So I achieved a brief notoriety, which is a genuine form of fame, in the eternal city.
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.
I'm embarrassed that after following your writing and videos for the past year I am only NOW learning that you got one of your degrees at Hopkins! I finished my musicology masters at Peabody and loved being around so much music. And I am very grateful that I was able to catch so many incredible BSO concerts with Marin Alsop before she left. Although there were plenty of mortifyinf moments in that hall, especially when we students rushed in with last-minute tickets... 😁
Nowadays it seems like the Shriver series is pulling most of the musical weight in Baltimore while the BSO gets its sea legs under its new conductor.
Ok, I'll volunteer. In my freshman year of undergrad, the week before classes began, I attended, with the others in the percussion studio, a solo recital given by a recent graduate. The program featured one work, a personal "realization" of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonata for solo percussion, featuring a vast array of percussion instruments surrounding the performer, complete with toy piano and mounted, distorted electric guitar, and other oddities. (The studio itself, it must be remarked, had a pervasive culture of celebrating avant-garde and unusual repertoire above all else, which was a total culture shock, coming from a very conservative high school music program.)
The work itself was interesting, but interminable. The electric guitar sound, hooked up to a laptop and amplifier, was played at a decibel that would give an airplane a run for its money (I wore earplugs the entire concert).
We were nearing the end of the work, with all of us in the audience feeling quite spent. The performer had just played a cataclysmic guitar chord, which slowly had reverberated out to nothingness. What followed was the one moment of prolonged, powerful silence in the work.
Or at least, it would've been, had I not accidentally let loose the loudest fart at that moment. The other audience members, admirably, tried their hardest to suppress laughter as the performer clunked out a coda on the toy piano, but it was too late. By the end of the piece, everyone in the audience had begun to laugh, including me, while I held my head in shame. Even the performer had noticed the, uh, change in the air among the audience.
A year later, I happened upon the same fellow at a local college party, who jokingly confronts me with: "are you the motherfucker that farted during my concert that one time?"
Good times.
Yours are enough for everyone, Dave! Goodness me! I've had nothing at all, only an old fella who erupted in conducting orgasm during a Haydn symphony at The Anvil, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England. My home town. It was awesome, he really loved that moment!
I went to Peabody in Baltimore, and I used to sub and play extra trombone with the Balt Symphony with Commisiona at the Lyric. Back in the day. Maybe you heard me.
I'll bet I did.
I lived in Baltimore during Commissiona's time there. One big concert I hoped I'd love was his performance of Gurre-Lieder, but as it turned out, from my seat in the first balcony none of ANY of the soloists could be heard above the orchestra. The musicians sounded GREAT, the chorus pretty good, but the solo voices? I have no idea!
As an orchestral instrumentalist under semi-auspicious circumstances, I was mortified due to my unintentional solo. During a moment of silence in anticipation of a tutti chord, I miscounted and played my note one beat ahead of everyone else. As Homer Simpson once said, "Monorail!"
I went to a New York Philharmonic concert where Bernhard Klee was conducting Mahler's 1st. During one of the middle movements, I suffered an excruciating attack of gas. I never should have gone to Tad's Steakhouse beforehand.
You could have timed that listening to the Haydn London symphony slow movement I title "gas attack."
I went to Mahler 8 one time in the concertgebouw with a friend and just as the first movement finishes with those choral arpeggios my friend wanted to shift in his seat. Problem is that the seats are absolutely terrible and you don’t have a lot of space. Well the music stops and everyone is impressed and attentively quiet when my friend tried to shift again, but then his foot slipped really hard over the polished wooden floor which made a huge noise that sounded almost exactly like a thunderous fart.. you could feel the tension shifting to us with baffled faces and me trying not to die from holding my laugh in and him having his face red as a beet. What happened in that time span is a bit of a blur to me now, but it felt like they waited a solid 10 minutes until they started part 2..
Just curious. Who was conducting?
Jules van Hessen
In April of 2014, Leif Segerstam conducting Mahler 9 with the Turku Philharmonic, Finland. During the very last page of the finale, when everything is dying down, quiet as can be, all of a sudden, from a few rows back, someone apparently falls off their seat (Maybe fell asleep?) And then start howling in pain for a couple seconds, Segerstam turns around and looks into the audience, some people help the poor fallen person out of the hall, and Leif turns around again, and continues conducting, right where he left the note "hanging"... It was a very jarring moment, in such a serene and quiet part of that wonderful finale!
In the early 1980s I attended a concert at The Royal Festival Hall London where Aaron Copland was conducting his own 80th Birthday Concert. One of the pieces performed was Copland's own Quiet City. Unfortunately, just after the piece started a quite loud and repetitive striking noise started and continued throughout the piece. Copland conducting the piece remained oblivious to the noise, despite the fact that a couple in the audience stood up and tried to draw his attention to the problem. At the end Copland and soloist walked off the stage still apparently unaware. This marked the half way point of the concert. During the interval the problem was corrected. Apparently, one of the sound sensors in the ceiling of the hall had malfunctioned. Copland was informed of the earlier problem, and repeated Quiet City, this time undisturbed.
This wasn’t mortifying but it was pretty funny - I was at a concert in Dublin where a youth orchestra was playing Tchaikovsky’s 5th. Towards the end of the second movement during the brief pause after the trumpets come roaring in with the motto theme everyone erupted into applause thinking the movement was over. It wasn’t just a few people, it was the entire hall (The audience was almost entirely friends and family of the young musicians). It took a few seconds for people to stop clapping because nobody could tell the music was still going because you couldn’t hear the clarinets that come in aftarwards. There was no clapping after the third movement, and people were hesitant to clap after the fourth.
Maybe you could share some of the funniest things you’ve witnessed at a concert?
Best laughs I had all day. Thanks!
Dave, I went to a performance of the Emerson string quartet final tour, and this gentleman behind me told his friends that Shostakovich was essentially American. His friends all went, oh, how interesting! And I've been dying to ask you and your lovely listeners... Does anyone know what he's talking about? It kind of tainted it for me because I'm sitting there thinking, didn't he get an award from Lenin? Anyway, I am a fairly new concert goer. Thank you for giving me the courage to get out of my shell and just go ❤
It's a nonsensical comment, period.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Thank you! Now I can finally just try to forget it.
Great sound effects in that third story! :-)
Well, last year there was a performance of Wojciech Kilar's "Krzesany" by the Cracow Phil under Antoni Wit. The piece requiers noisy folk-like percussion for the cheerful finale which is often performed by a group children (it's an ad libitum part so they can have some fun). And so it was at that evening. But during the last forte before the finale one of the kids has fainted on stage due to schrieckieng sound of fortissimo brass. There was some chaos around and four adults from the audience grabbed the poor kid like a coffin and took him out of the hall. But the orchestra kept playing. In that exact moment the mood of the piece changed to a funeral one so it looked like a funeral procession! After all the kid was all right but the accident was so in pair with the music that it had a truly mortifying impression...
2021. Zubin Mehta conducted Belgrade philharmonic in Belgrade. Shortly before the beginning of the concert, one of the big lighting lamps fell directly on stage where musicians were siting. Thank God, they reacted quickly (i don't know how) but it could have ended tragically.
I was watching a performance of Shostakovich's 8th with the RPO and Vasily Petrenko conducting. It was in the Royal Festival Hall and I was naturally really excited to see Petrenko doing Shostakovich, but it was in the second half and they don't check the tickets for reentry, so an unsavoury group of about four or five men came to free ride in a few of the empty seats in the balcony. They seemed to take a sadistic joy in being disruptive. All through the first two movements they were there talking, crackling their plastic cups deliberately loudly then giggling about it. People were giving them dirty looks, it didn't help. I think the group got bored and left. Still a great performance and I'm happy I saw it live because I love that symphony now, but it was excruciatingly frustrating, especially in that first movement.
Once I fell asleep during bach c minor mass and my friend that came to me did as well. We were both in a very sleep deprived time. But a singer friend of mine told us that the singers were so bad she had to leave (those proud singers...) so maybe we didnt miss much
My daughter was, on my recommendation, attending a performance of Crumb’s “Black Angels.” During a quiet section,her phone went off, even though she had silenced it before the start of the performance. She frantically tried to shut it off, to no avail. As it turned out, the “find my phone” app had somehow been activated (inexplicably). It took a long time to resolve. To make matters worse, she was well-known to the quartet as she had been taught and coached by all of them! I don’t think she’s gotten over it yet.
I have a Woolsey Hall story too. The New Haven Symphony, in 1991, Mahler's Fourth. At the very beginning of the final movement, one of the elderly folks who used to get bussed in for the concerts, fell asleep and proceeded to loudly snore through the entire movement. I mean, buzzsaw loud. The acoustics at Woolsey are really lively, so the sound of that honker was just bouncing and echoing off the walls. It was equal parts horrifying and utterly hilarious.
But on balance, it was downright awful. Keep in mind, the orchestra only used to play about four or five programs a season - and they would only get one performance of every program - and their one crack at it was always on a Tuesday night in New Haven! (Talk about a thankless task!) - and their whole performance was wrecked. It was clear that they had worked very hard on the piece, and the performance was quite good - but then it just got demolished. I felt really, really bad for the soprano. Here she snagged a gig to sing Mahler, and zzzzzzz. I hope she laughs about it now.
The weirdest part to me was - nobody even nudged the guy or tried to rouse him. Everyone in his immediate vicinity just ignored him like nothing was happening.
Your sound effects!!!
I have several. Most memorably, the ENTIRE audience was mortified at a Chicago Symphony concert in the early 2000's, when a world-famous Russian guest conductor and his piano soloist/wife were performing the Strauss Burleske. I was following the score, and she (the soloist) mistakenly jumped ahead several pages. The Maestro immediately turned to her, then clutched his own chest and slumped over towards the podium. The soloist/wife gracefully...seamlessly glided off the piano bench to her husband, and gently led him, as he shuffled off the stage. The entire audience (and the orchestra) was stunned. Henry Fogel then appeared on stage, informing us that the house doctor was examining the stricken maestro, and the intermission would now begin. We were all to "hang loose" to see if, in fact, the maestro would be able to conduct the second half of the concert. Boy, did he EVER. He LEAPT to the podium with the grace of a gazelle, and launched into (I believe) the Skyscrapers ballet by John Alden Carpenter, after which both he and his wife performed a little 10-movement suite by Schnittke, which involved lots of comic bits between them at the piano (with metronomes, etc). They were like two kids, enjoying the hell out of it. We, the audience, were relieved and hugely entertained...but some of us felt that the onstage Schnittke "routine" between the maestro and his wife had actually been the LESSER of their two theatrical events that night. LR
@@gerontius3 Did I give too many clues?
@@gerontius3 I only know Anusov from his Lt Kije Suite, which was the filler on the powerhouse 1961 LP recording of his son's Prokofiev Third Sym from 1961. I'll check the Francesca. And, yes, I suppose one could look back and see the humorous aspects of the CSO concert hi-jinx I describe above......
That second story sounds like a scene out of a Seinfeld episode.
Dear David
You should have been a comedian
It is. It’s basically the PEZ dispenser episode. Life imitating Seinfeld once again.
My quartet and I (all of us high school aged musicians) went to see (coincidentally enough) Shostakovich 5 in Chicago with Honeck in November of last year, and we had one violinist who was always completely unaware of how much noise she made. Being November (and we also took the train and walked a mile in the blistering cold of Chicago), her nose was understandably quite runny. But how she dealt with it was certainly less understandable. She sniveled the loudest I have ever heard anyone snivel in the largo (it’s always the largo) and it was like WTF… but whatever.
Another Baltimore story...when I first became fanatical about classical music, I used to feel self-righteous indignation at the cretins who would thoughtlessly ruin a musical experience by creating some kind of noise distraction during concerts. Whether it was narcissistic need to talk during a performance or some kind of beeping devices (this was pre-cellphone days), I would get extremely irate internally and rage that my experience was being tarnished. After all, the very essence we were there to take in was sound, so distractions I viewed as a major sin! A few years went by, and there was a particular instance where I attended a senior guitar recital at Peabody in their smaller hall. He's playing a Sor sonata, when suddenly I hear some kind of electronic beeping, and it doesn't stop. I was flabbergasted and sorry for the performer whose senior recital had to be impacted by some awkward numbskull who clearly doesn't value this kind of thing. I go from anger to shame when I realize after a few seconds that IT WAS MY OWN DEVICE, something I had just acquired to try to clean up the mess of my life. I turned it off as quickly as I could, although it was a new device so it wasn't clear exactly how to shut it off. I heaped the opprobrium on myself that I deserved...then realized how ridiculously random life could be. I talked with the performer afterward and he chuckled about it, didn't let it ruin his day. I was able to learn to be more forgiving of others because of that moment.
There was a concert at New York's Merkin Concert Hall showcasing various marimba players and works written for them. One of the performers started to play the most vulgar, pretentious, audience baiting and stupid pieces of music I've ever heard in my life. I was sitting with a fellow musician friend, and we could't help but laugh and snicker during the performance, and we passed snide notes back and forth. The piece finished, and sitting right behind us was the composer, who duly reprimanded us! Another unforgettable incident was at the New York premier of George Rochberg's String Quartets 4, 5 & 6. I was sitting with two composer friends of mine, and at the very moment the concert ended and the applause started, one of my friends stood up and at the top of his voice yelled "Boo! Fraud" over and over again. Cringe worthy!
Once I attended an Oscar Edelstein concert. My poor dad who is not into music was trying to look like he enjoyed the music
The jujube story is hilarious! As teenage music students in Australia, we dutifully used to go to free orchestral concerts of the latest Australian contemporary music, which was often terrible. It was mostly of the 'tinkle and fart' variety. The studio where the concerts were held had seats that were ganged together, and it would only take a fart from the trombone or similar, to set one of us off, and slowly the whole row of seats would be shaking uncontrollably! Even if someone down the other end of the row got the giggles, we would get it too!
Did the orchestra ultimately knew who’s feet it was ? 😂
Nope.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Haha well if some are still around now you can't be sure about that anymore. Great video by the way, I'm all for more of this type.
The second and the third stories have a grain of a typical Seinfeld scene...
I took a date to Mahler 1, which received a glorious performance. But at the "Jewish Wedding" music in the slow movement, both of us were consumed with laughter because it was so "on point". Very embarrassing.