This was supposed to be a short review of the free concert at Avery Fisher Hall on Saturday evening previewing the Mostly Mozart Festival, which opens officially on Tuesday. And I can tell you some of what happened there.Louis Langrée, the festival’s music director, conducted the orchestra in a 75-minute intermissionless concert of works by Mozart (the “Nozze di Figaro” Overture and the “Linz” Symphony, both part of the Tuesday program of Mozart) and Stravinsky (the Symphony in C, to be performed later in the season). The juxtaposition was significant, since the festival this year includes a substantial helping of music by Stravinsky, whom Jane Moss, the artistic director of Lincoln Center, described in remarks from the stage as “an unusual or unpredictable ally” to Mozart.
I leave it to reviewers during the season to describe specific ways in which Stravinsky’s Neo-Classicism (actually, as much neo-Baroque as anything else) may relate to Mozart’s Classicism. And I hesitate to delve further into details of the performances, because I was thoroughly distracted throughout.
The man seated directly behind me was connected to a portable medical device, presumably an oxygen cart to aid his breathing, that emitted a steady ticking. Hard to describe, it was really more a faint, dull metallic clank in a relentless rhythm that seemed somehow resistant to all the many other rhythms emanating from the stage.
I have no idea how many people heard it: 4 or 5 immediately around, 15 or 20 in the vicinity? And I have no idea how I would have reacted if not for a worrying experience of my own last year. As it was, I found it impossible to ignore.
In February 2010 I had heart surgery to replace a congenitally faulty aortic valve with a mechanical model. Mechanical valves tick, I had been told, and since much of my professional life involves sitting in concert halls as unobtrusively as possible, this was a troubling prospect. I buttonholed the surgeon with my concerns on the morning of the operation, and he assured me — whether taking me seriously or, as I suspect, humoring me — that he would install the quietest valve he could find.
Be that as it may, in my drug-enlivened imaginings of the next few days, I heard a thudding that suggested I had swallowed a bass drum. Soon enough it became apparent that all I had swallowed was a metronome, and a reasonably quiet one at that. Today even I can hear the ticking only in a small, reverberant space or in the dead of night. No one has yet tried to shush me in a concert hall. But what if. ...
So your first, humane reaction to seeing someone in need of physical relief has to be: There but for the grace of God (and wonderful medical expertise and technology) go I. But other, possibly less humane reactions crowd in.
Classical music audiences, with their ceaseless demands for silence in their surroundings, may be seen as a pampered and intolerant lot by the hardier fans of other art forms. (And yes, I know about the rowdy aristocratic patrons at opera performances in Handel’s time.) But quiet is essential for classical music in its unamplified — that is, its classic — form, where contrast is everything. The uproar in a Mahler symphony can be huge (cough now, please, if you must), but the countervailing pianissimos and silences are equally important and often far more eloquent.
Editors’ Picks
13 Nourishing Recipes to Help You Reset in the Kitchen
The Dirt on Clean Beauty
When the Camera Can’t Turn Away, These Women Force Us to Listen
Perhaps the most ill-timed cough I ever heard came at one of the most exquisite moments in all of Schubert, at a luminous harmonic shift in the slow movement of his posthumous B flat Sonata. (When I lamented that intrusion, I was criticized by readers suggesting that I didn’t know how bad it could be when you really had to cough during a concert. Oh, really? In a half-century of all-weather, all-health concertgoing?)
The whine of a malfunctioning hearing aid is familiar to veteran performers and concertgoers. Random noises are one thing, and bad enough; a rattled listener may be able to get back in the groove. But a steady, inescapable rhythm that is out of rhythm with everything else going on, even amid Stravinsky’s syncopations, totally compromises a meaningful experience of the music.
No one wants to deprive others of that experience. So is the discontent of a few listeners and the inability of a critic to do his job merely acceptable collateral damage for the listener who needs mechanical help?
I, of all people, have no answer. Happily, Lincoln Center does, at least in part.
“The Avery Fisher Hall staff makes every effort to accommodate patrons with medical equipment to protect the enjoyment of all members of the audience during concerts,” a spokeswoman wrote by e-mail. “If a staff member sees a patron coming into the hall with an oxygen cart or other visible medical equipment, they will alert the performance manager on duty, who will talk to the patron about whether or not the patron should be seated in a special section.”
In addition “if a patron complains to an usher at intermission, or at the end of a piece, about the noise being made by one of these devices, the usher will arrange for the person with the noisy device to be moved to another seat in a special section.”
Wallowing in the confusion bred of personal experience, I doubt that I would have complained even if there had been an intermission. But maybe next time I will, if only to spare you a lengthy explanation in place of what should be a short review.