Kudos to David Patrick Stearns, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s classical music critic, who has done what so many of us have longed to do when an errant mobile phone goes off in the middle of a slow movement – or in this case, the start of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. In the Musikverein in Vienna, where the Philadelphia Orchestra, their music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and violinist Lisa Batiashvili have been on tour this week, Stearns was driven to unusual acts of concert hall etiquette-saving behaviour when a fellow audience member in the eighth row of the stalls was entranced by her phone and an apparently repeated stream of Facebook notifications, emails, or whatever else was more interesting to her than Shostakovich.
Stearns went for it, “American-style”, as he writes. “Yours truly reached over, took the phone out of her hand, and pocketed it until intermission. Another phone (unfortunately out of my reach) went off during Batiashvili’s cadenza. Was it my imagination or did her playing grow increasingly angry? The music takes well to that emotion, and Shostakovich got the most uproarious applause of the night” – even more than the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony in the second half. The person’s reaction to this US Department of Concert Behavior intervention isn’t, alas, recorded.
Until it happens to you – and you realise during Arvo Pärt’s awesomely quiet Spiegel im Spiegel that you’ve left your own mobile on its loudest setting, making the rest of the performance the longest, most stressful, cold-sweat-inducing 10 minutes of your life – it’s easy to sneer inwardly or even curse outwardly at the crass insensitivity of those who can’t remember to silence their mobile phones.
But it’s not the individual ringers that annoy me the most - it can and does happen to us all (and having once mistakenly managed to switch on sodding voice control during a live broadcast of Wagner’s Das Rheingold through what must have been an especially weird contortion in one of the Royal Albert Hall’s seats, I know what I’m talking about) it’s rather the serial offenders, even if their phones are on silent, that are the true destroyers of the concert hall atmosphere. It’s the unmistakable blue glow in the gloaming after the lights have dimmed and the music has started that really gets me, those for whom looking at the virtual world of social pseudo-interactivity is a more fulfilling way to spend the golden hour or more of a Mahler symphony than actually, you know, being in the moment of the performance and losing yourself to the ecsastic effulgence of the piece.
There is such a thing as visual noise, where your attention is drawn by the baleful electric halo of smartphone blue that doesn’t switch off until sometime during the scherzo. Those distracting screens are – for me – just as ruinous as an audible ringtone. In any case: all hail David Patrick Stearns for calling time on smartphone insanity in the Musikverein.
