Performers get creative when facing disruptions
Audience members subject to humiliation for coughing and other indiscretions
I have a New Year’s resolution. Will you join me? In 2014, I’m going to perfect the art of self-asphyxiation. It’s not pretty. But neither is the act of cough-bombing a performance during its most sublime pianissimo. And as I’m convulsing in my seat, eyes watering, my sleeve pressed to my purple face, I will focus on this consoling thought: At least I won’t be singled out and reprimanded by the performer onstage.
In November, guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas dealt with a bronchial audience at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert by tossing cough lozenges into the crowd in between movements of Mahler’s Ninth.
Earlier that month, after giving a marathon recital of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations to a reverentially silent Boston crowd, pianist Andras Schiff stopped in the middle of his encore to scold an audience member who had coughed.
“I am giving you a gift,” he told the embarrassed offender. “Don’t spoil it.” That’s also the message jazz pianist Keith Jarrett relays to his audiences, only his exact words are not printable here.
In this anything-goes age, it seems as if coughing in concerts is fast becoming one of the last universally reviled forms of high-culture hooliganism. That vilification rests on the assumption that a person can control a cough, hold it in until a less exposed moment in the music and, when all else fails, muffle it.
At the beginning of a recent performance of Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall, coughs rippled through the audience like “bullfrogs calling to one another at night from different parts of the swamp,” to borrow the priceless image coined by pianist Susan Tomes in her blog (susantomes.com).
As my companion, a former member of the Navy SEALs, remarked during the intermission, if he and his teammates had been able to suppress coughing during a nighttime raid into the dodgier neighbourhoods of Ramadi during a tour of Iraq, why not a group of New Yorkers comfortably seated in Carnegie Hall?
Maybe with the military example in mind, musicians feel all it takes is the threat of violence or, by proxy, public humiliation, to quell the coughing and other disturbances like ringing cellphones, latecomers and early quitters. In September, I watched conductor Alan Gilbert react to two women who quietly slipped out of a New York performance in between movements: He turned in their direction, fixed them with his gaze and gave a mock-friendly grin and wave. His gesture drew big laughs from the audience.
Some years ago in Israel, I was at a performance of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra when a cellphone — its ring tone set to the Till Eulenspiegels overture — went off in between movements. The conductor turned toward the sound and made as if to conduct it. There was an element of public shaming about the gesture, but it also provided an opportunity for the collective indignation in the auditorium to resolve itself in laughter.
To what extent should performers acknowledge such disturbances in the audience? Isn’t it their job to remain focused on the music? At what point is the integrity of a performance so damaged by interruptions in the auditorium that it can only be salvaged by an additional inter- ruption by the performer?
When soprano Anna Netrebko flashed a smile during the ovation after her aria Al dolce guidami in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011 production of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, she raised eyebrows by “breaking character.”
Do conductors and soloists break character when they allow themselves to react to events in the room? Or is it one of the hallmarks of a live performance that it feeds off the energy in the room, and a sign of authenticity when a musician acknowledges its specific features?
These questions are difficult to answer because the social contract at the heart of a musical performance is constantly being redefined. An 18th-century performer was keenly attuned to the goings-on in the (brightly lit) auditorium and expected to acknowledge, for instance, the arrival of an august patron in one of the boxes.
Catherine Turocy, a baroque dance expert whose workshop I attended in 2013, says she instructs her dancers to react to any events or sudden loud noises in the room — it’s an integral part of historical practice.
The ideal of a reverentially silent audience, plunged into darkness and wearing, as George Bernard Shaw once put it, its “churchiest expression” while the music plays, goes back only as far as the 19th century. Today, reverence toward anything — “churchiness” itself — is in limited supply, for better or worse. So is, increasingly, silence. The sterile conditions of the recording studio have accustomed both audiences and performers to an acoustic ideal that invariably comes up short against the realities of a New York auditorium in winter.
With all the emphasis on audiences being kept still and quiet, you’d think performers wanted us to pretend we’re not there. But here’s the odd thing: They vitally, desperately, want and need us to be there — living, breathing, rustling bodies that we are — because the music is diminished without us there to witness it.
The ideal silence is not one resulting from absence, but the silence created by a crowd of attentive listeners. Conductor Simon Rattle expressed that nicely when he addressed another fit of coughing after the opening movement of Mahler’s Ninth in 2007. “This piece starts with silence and returns to silence,” he told the crowd at Carnegie Hall. “The audience can help to create the piece by remaining silent.”
When we in the audience start seeing silence not as a passive inconvenience but as our own special assignment, we become more willing to suffer discomfort for it, as one would on night patrol with the SEALs. But the reverse holds for the Keith Jarretts and Andras Schiffs of this world: An audience’s silence is its own gift to them and may have been achieved at great cost. It’s not their entitlement.