![]() ‘Nothing happened,’ Gilbert later explained. In January 2012 when a mobile phone began ringing during a New York Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, music director Alan Gilbert stopped the performance and asked the unknown offender to turn off the phone. Turn off your phone or risk ritual humiliationĭespite Leonard Slatkin’s headline-grabbing request that ‘audiences turn on their phones’ at a recent Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert – an effort to encourage photography and to present the orchestra as ‘the most accessible on the planet’ – for most conductors and soloists, mobile phones are, at best, an irritation and, at worse, cause to flounce off the stage. With this in mind, here are six ways to avoid a soloist meltdown.ġ. Regardless of your views, the number of performers who are speaking – or acting – out against bad audience behaviour is growing. ![]() ![]() Are performers too precious and remote if they fail to see the funny side of the man snoring in the front row? Does the expectation that audiences not clap between movements alienate the new and uninitiated? Or are performers right to demand that not even a sniffle emanate from an assembled throng of several hundred? After all, music, more than any art form, is about the aural experience – and for the soloist, competing with coughing and chatter can’t be fun. The subject of audience etiquette has long been a cause of controversy.
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