It is not just bums on seats

As reviewer for the Peterborough Telegraph I get to comment on any number of performances by musicians and actors. But there’s one essential element in concerts and plays which I rarely mention. The audience. Yet, as everyone knows, there can be no meaningful public performance without people listening and looking on.

Which is why in conversations with promoters the talk always reverts to ‘bums on seats.’ It’s not a phrase I’m particularly fond of. I prefer to think of the performing arts engaging people’s hearts and minds. But however we describe them, let’s focus on audiences in today’s Culture Vulture. Maybe including you. In fact maybe you attended the CPSO concert at the Queen Katharine Academy recently. It was a wonderful occasion for many reasons, not least because of the capacity audience. When Charlotte McAuliffe appeared on stage to play the Elgar Cello Concerto you felt everybody was supporting the musicians and willing them on. But once the music started there was concentrated silence for half an hour until tumultuous applause broke out at the end.

So what? you might be thinking. Isn’t that what always happens at live events? Well, a week before there’d been a moving performance of Bach’s St John Passion at Peterborough Cathedral. The audience had been invited to welcome conductor Steven Grahl to the platform, so there was a burst of applause at the start of the concert. But at the end of the first half there was only an awkward silence as Steven gathered up his score and shuffled off.

This wasn’t because the audience was displeased but because there’s an old tradition that you don’t clap religious works performed in church until the very end. A custom ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’? Certainly in the past I’ve attended performances where the audience has had to sit still for maybe three hours without having the opportunity to applaud.

Something similar happened in November at a Peterborough Vocal Collective event in St John’s Church. It was an exemplary concert of spiritual music that aspired towards the heavenly, but the audience was asked not to clap until the end of the first half. In a situation like this I’d suggest that performers need to remember that there is literally nothing else people can do while they sit on hard wooden benches for an hour.

The previous weekend I’d attended a Peterborough Jazz Club gig. Comparisons are invidious but I’ll admit I love the laidback, free

‘n’ easy ambience of jazz events, where applause is encouraged not just at the end of every number but after every solo. But no, I’m emphatically not suggesting that this approach would work in classical concerts! In sonatas and quartets for instance there’s nothing worse than applause between movements, amounting to an interruption of the composer’s musical thought.

Clearly there are different traditions of audience behaviour which operate for different musical genres, but there’s one problem which currently confronts them all. I mean the intrusion of digital devices at live events.

At the cathedral concert I mentioned it was good to read this unequivocal message in the programme. ‘Please ensure that all mobile phones are switched off prior to this evening’s performance.’

And at a recent concert at the Key Theatre, ‘no photographs or filming during this event.’

You’d imagine that people would realise that these activities are disruptive and distracting for other audience members. They are also usually an infringement of copyright law.

Yet sadly there have been occasions recently where phones and cameras have started to appear. For example much of the entrancing Katharine of Aragon concert, also at Peterborough Cathedral, was spoiled by repeated clicking by a cameraman. Nothing to do with this newspaper I should add! And at St John’s people have been known to produce phones to make recordings.

If you’re tempted to get your phone or camera out at a concert or a play just remember Mr Punch’s excellent advice to those about to get married. ‘Don’t!’