Living in Center City Philadelphia brings with it a lot of perks. I can do almost anything I want just by walking a few blocks. This includes walking to all the music concerts I’m always craving. Classical music concerts. I know this blog is eternally boring and nerdy. Today’s gripes won’t help that image.
But this past week I went to two classical music concerts and experienced some of the rudest behavior I have witnessed in a long while. First, Thursday night was a concert at Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Orchestra played three pieces, a Brahms concerto in the first half and two pieces by Sibelius in the second half.
The Brahms was Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83. It started out fine, but then about halfway through the first movement a chorus of coughs and throat clearings began echoing through the Orchestra level seating. Keep in mind it was in the upper 70s most of the week. It has been unseasonably warm. Then in the middle of the slowest part of the second movement, a man let out an extended, very well projected yawn. It was a multi-part, differentiated solo triumph that momentarily diverted the attention of all of us in the Orchestra Tier.
After intermission, the Orchestra began their first ever performance of Sibelius’s In Memoriam, Op. 59. Unfortunately, the conductor rudely chose to begin before the woman seated behind me had finished her conversation with her husband. To show she felt no hard feelings, the woman proceeded to finish her conversation and provide the rest of us with a free demonstration in how to execute what is called the perfect stage whisper. I hope any acting students in attendance took notes on her technique. For Sibelius’s Symphony No. 3 there were merely rumblings of coughing to an extent I have only heard before at my doctor’s waiting room in late January.
No worries, though, I thought, because Friday night I get to hear a Chamber Music concert at the American Philosophical Society and it is a program of all Beethoven. As the concert was about to begin, the woman on the end of my row pulled a large bottle of cough syrup out of her bag and took several big gulps. I thought perhaps my luck had changed.
The first piece was Seven Variations on Bei Mannern, welche Liebe fuhlen, from Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflote. I expected a beautiful duo but instead was treated to a dissonant trio; joining the piano and cello was the high pitched feedback from one of my fellow patron’s hearing aids. I am very sensitive to the fact that for many hearings aids are a necessity (and the way I listen to music with headphones I will probably need one some day). Still, a beautiful piece of music was marred. The man who had introduced the program asked us all to check our hearing aids after the first piece and indeed the noise was not present in the rest of the concert.
That is not to say the second piece, Piano Sonata in E Minor, did not contain any additions. Throughout the piece it seemed that someone familiar with the piece was humming along, off key, but always breaking off before the last few notes of each phrase. During the intermission that followed, this seemed the singular topic of conversation. The woman next to me said that she had attended the opera the previous night where, in the middle of one of the most famous arias in the opera canon, someone’s cell phone rang. Luckily the night I attended Rigoletto the audience was obedient. Then we heard a rumor buzzing about that it was the pianist himself who had hummed. This story was confirmed when, right before the end of the intermission, the director of the series came over and told the woman next to me that “he has been humming for years.” the woman added that Toscanini used to do that, and it can be heard on some of his recordings.
The final piece of the evening, the amazing Piano Trio in G major, Op.1, also contained humming by the amazingly talented Claude Frank. Enough that the cellist and violinist exchanged more than one smirk during the performance. But the effect was marred for me anyway because I spent the whole time looking at Mr. Frank’s mouth, which was mouthing out… sounds? The whole time.
Both of these events were attended predominately by people much older and more sophisticated in dress and grooming. And yet many of them behaved without any sense of respect for the music. My partner says I am a reverse curmudgeon.