How Geffen Hall coped with NY earthquake
OrchestrasAn eyewitness report from Friday morning’s concert for slippedisc.com:
At Geffen Hall there was a program of Webern 5 Pieces for Orchestra; Strauss Tod und Verklärung; Ravel Piano Concerto in G (with Alice Sara Ott, who had made her NYPO debut the night before); Scriabin Le Poème de l’extase. The conductor was Karina Canellakis, also making her Philharmonic debut.
The earthquake was at about 10:30am. Then followed the phone alerts indicating there may be aftershocks.
At right around 11am, when the concert was to begin, the alarms started to go off in the hall. And they went off. And they went off. Nobody seemed to know that you must TURN OFF the phone to stop the alerts.
Canellakis came out to much applause and began the Webern. When all was quiet in the hall, more alarms.
She finally began the piece. It was clear that the phone alarms were going off throughout, but loud sections of the music drowned out the distraction. Then came the Ravel. Much of the audience was getting fed up with the idiots who didn’t know enough to turn off their phone. The worst part of all that as soon as Ott began the 2nd movement, exquisite in its quiet beauty, another went off! There was a very audible groan from many in the audience, along was a few shouting to turn off your
After the intermission, an announcement came on and told the audience to physically turn off their phones as the emergency alert overrides all other settings. Significant applause at the announcement. Yet once again, during the Scriabin, which is a huge, loud piece, there were sporadic alarms going off which were noticeable during quiet passages.
A concert I’ll not soon forget, but definitely not in a good way.
photo: NYPO/ Erin Baiano
Apple has made it so difficult to turn a phone off, most of the geriatrics in that audience wouldn’t k ow how anyway.
It was pretty over-the-top, the amount of alarm messages I got yesterday over all of this. And 45 minutes after the fact.
Hmmmmn. I got nothing. Android. Only Presidential alarms (might) get through.
Hold down the left and right buttons, then swipe on “slide to power off”. I wouldn’t call that difficult, but some people have melded their brains to their phones, and seem to be afraid that they will lose their connection with the world if they shut it off.
The phone interruptions might have been intentional on the part of folks who don’t like to see women conducting. If not intentional, then just one more example of the scourge of cell phones and computers making life miserable for sensitive people who love music.
Seek help for your paranoia. And find out about Occam’s Razor.
I have one, but it does not always work well, at certain places.
Sally
Dumbest take, but kinda par for the course these days.
Margaret,
Are you suggesting that people who don’t like to see women conductors would go to see a woman conductor, and then deliberately fail to turn off their phone after an earthquake, as a protest ?
How frustrating for them that their expensive and astonishingly well planned protest could so easily be mistaken for simple confusion in an unfamiliar situation.
I was sitting in a third tier box for this concert, and I would agree that many were intentionally leaving their phones on, as I could see screens alit all over the place on the orchestra level. I mostly saw people scrolling, probably looking for information about the earthquake, or texting to someone. If they didn’t like to see women conducting, why would they show up to the concert in the first place? The audience was mostly geriatric, and they aren’t inclined toward passive-aggressive protests in the manner you describe. Of course, some of those probably don’t know how to turn off their phones…..
So good to choose “Le Poème de l’extase” we don’t hear that frequently.
This week the BSO under Nelsons has been performing Prometheus, with lighting effects based on the composer’s instruction, and using modern technology. I attended yesterday. Not my cup of tea, but it was interesting and overall well done.
You have to Hear the version of Abbado with Boston
Abbado led (and recorded) Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy,” while the performance yesterday—with color organ—was of his “Prometheus, the Poem of Fire.”
And it was magnificent both times that I went. The last 90 seconds especially are such an intense communion with the divine, as Scriabin intended.
We had an earthquake?
I’ve been in Tokyo during one. That’s an earthquake.
I was there. It was a disaster. Kudos to the professionalism of all the musicians who kept calm and carried on. The selfishness of these audience members who showed no respect to either the musicians or their fellow listeners who did turn their phone off…they must be very special and important……the Russian National disease may be paranoia but the American one is narcissism. Incidentally the earthquake would not have bothered a resident of Tokyo at all……my seat neighbor thought it was a subway train….
Worst audience by far. Pathetic
What Webern? 5 Pieces Op. 10, 5 Pieces Op. 5, or 6 Pieces Op.6?
No way to tell from any source I’ve read.
And yes, we care, dammit.
It was actually 6 Pieces, op. 6b, as per the progam.
And it was very well done in as far as I could tell among the chorus of alarms going off. The NYPO had a marvellous large golden tam tam which sounded WONDERFUL. For reasons I don’t understand this was subbed off for the regular (less wonderful) tam tam for the Strauss. A mistake in my view and I was thinking after the guy died in the Strauss – “more tam tam Karina!!”
It was one of the most unfortunately stressful concert going experiences I’ve had in recent memory, with audience members shouting at each other to turn off their phones , the discordant minor second of the long-redundant emergency alert blaring unpredictably from all parts of the hall through the most delicate moments, and the frustration of watching audience members down in the orchestra section stubbornly scrolling through social media feeds the entire concert and just ignoring the ushers and announcements to turn off their phones. But somehow still not as bad as any Peoples Symphony concert.
Too bad about the interruptions – that was some really fine programming.
On the morning of Sunday 16 April 1972, in the Musikvereinsaal, Leonard Bernstein and the VPO began a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. An audience member later wrote,
“Shortly after the start of the concert, people quickly stood up and starting leaving the concert hall in a panic. There was a rumble. I thought it was a bass drum roll. It was a moderately strong earthquake.”
There were no further tremors and the performance was restarted shortly thereafter.
Karina shone in a fabulous and intelligent program!
She is a fabulous and very musical conductor and a great communicator, I had the pleasure of performing Rachmaninoff’s The Bells at last Edinburgh Festival and she made it such a special occasion. Shame about the mobile phone scourge, oh, just to switch them off for two hours….
A couple of years ago,during a performance of Daphnis et Chloe with the LAPO unter Dutoit, there was a much stronger earthquake.The audience was far more disciplined.
I was at the performance (and my own cell phone went off – which I quickly quieted)…further alarms became just a minor annoyance to me…but my takeaway was that while she was a fine conductor and the orchestra played very well, I couldn’t help thinking of what master interpreters (e.g. Karl Boehm, Fritz Reiner – and, yes, Eugene Ormandy) have done with those scores – she’s got a way to go before she enters that interpretive league.
Well I concur in regard to the Strauss, which was perfectly good but not anything like Petrenko for example. The Scriabin I thought was very good indeed, Chris Martin was a stellar trumpet (also in the Ravel) and I loved that she pushed along without rushing but slowed down for the final peroration and built the last chord up extra long in the manner of Svetlanov (not quite but sorta). I don’t think Ormandy ever did the Scriabin, but Stoki did and did it well
Not only did Ormandy conduct the Scriabin Poeme, he recorded it for RCA, along with the Prometheus. It was one of his last recordings in Philadelphia.
Ormandy recorded the Scriabin for RCA coupled with the Poem of Fire on LSC-3214 with the entire Poem Of Ecstasy printed on the back cover (speaking of the LP of course)! Great performances if you can find them.
If you have access to the Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall, listen to their performance with Petrenko from a dozen years ago of the Scriabin. It holds together better than any commercial recording that I have heard, and the Velenczei captures the full range of dynamics and intensity changes in the trumpet part. This concert figures as part of Petrenko’s “audition”, since he only conducted the orchestra in three concert series before his appointment in 2015.
The Ravel was AFTER the intermission! It was insane. The Webern literally ended with the sound of alarms. Throughout the entire concert from beginning to end there were alarms. Even the final grand pause near the end of the Scriabin you could hear the alarms. Insane! You would think after two hours of non-stop alarms, multiple announcements, etc that people would get the picture!! Every single piece from before the concert began until the very end was ruined by alarms. Most ridiculous thing I’ve ever experienced.
Agreed. You see, these people are expecting a call from Biden so they have to have their phones on…………….
Why I stay home with my focals, people are tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo annoying these days.
Surprised-but-not-surprised by the flaming vitriol here about the noise interruptions. Usually justified — but this case is a classic example of hall management failing to easily address an important, discrete detail in this report: emergency alerts override phone settings. Most of the interruptions were innocent. I would have thought it enough to silence my phone, if I were there. The moment that the emergency alert arrived to everybody, the house manager should have known to take control and make an announcement that silencing phones won’t be enough, and a full shutdown is required.
The pearl-clutching and shaming by classical music audiences is Reason Number One why new and younger audiences avoid these concerts. Relax, people.
Nobody likes ringing phones at any performance – symphony, opera, play, funeral, religious service, Taylor Swift concert. Nowhere.
Misbehaving audiences can keep music lovers away from concerts.
Love of music brings new audiences in. Love of music takes repeat exposure to cultivate, preferably combined with active engagement. Nothing to do with attitudes or dress code. I’ve been seeing scruffy young people at concerts for almost 50 years.
I was there and the hall management did address it, in two separate announcements. They also had ushers going around and asking people to turn their phones all the way off. The problem is that a lot of people don’t actually know how to properly shut their phone down these days, especially older audience members (of which there were many, as this was an 11 am weekday concert).
I think it’s fair for people to be frustrated that an entire concert of sensitive repertoire was interrupted throughout — one doesn’t get to hear Poem of Ecstasy or Death & Transfiguration often, so this was disappointing for many of us. No one person’s fault, just an unfortunate situation.
The point is that your mobile telephone should ALWAYS be completely off during a concert, regardless of whether or not there is a known problem with alerts. (The whole point of a concert is to keep the risk of disruption to the minimum humanly possible.) Unfortunately, many people seem to think that this very simple requirement, even when articulated clearly, does not apply to them. I recall one occasion in the Wigmore Hall (a venue which *does* make an announcement at the beginning of concerts saying that mobile telephones must be “completely switched-off”, as well as reiterating the requirement in the free single-sheet concert programmes) where the person sitting directly behind me had his telephone ring loudly. Upon turning round to glare at him, he took no action for at least 15 seconds; at the end of the concert, he apologised and admitted that he could not believe it was his telephone that did it, saying “I had it on silent and on aeroplane mode”.
Personally, I remove the battery from my telephone (I make a point of having a handset where the battery is easily removable — for me, that has always been a non-negotiable requirement) and put it in a trouser pocket just before going into a hall… that way, there is absolutely no risk of the telephone activating by accident (I am pleased to say that my mobile telephone has NEVER disrupted a concert, although I must confess it did disrupt a rehearsal in which I was playing on two occasions in the distant past — I do not usually take the same level of precaution for rehearsals), and I can pat my pocket to confirm that I have definitely not forgotten.
You are absolutely right. Turn it off everyone. You are not that important.
“the house manager should have known to take control and make an announcement that silencing phones won’t be enough, and a full shutdown is required.”
That EXACT announcement was made………….but there are apparently many “special” members of the audience who clearly believed that did not apply to them…………….and believe me, the young people were not the cause of this issue, it was the old people and there were lots of them.
There wasn’t a “moment that the emergency alert arrived to everybody”. It went off in waves over the entire concert, and after the concert people were still getting alerts. If you were responsible, and had your phone on silent to begin with, the emergency alert sounding should have told anyone that was thinking that it must override the silent mode (or airplane mode, for that matter). My alert went off before the concert began, and the obvious solution was to completely turn off the phone, and someone from backstage addressed the audience unintelligibly in the first half, and clearly after the intermission, that me needed to “physically turn off our phones”. I wouldn’t characterize those that didn’t follow up on this as “innocent”; I think the words “ignorant or oblivious” would be more appropriate. It wasn’t the case of an isolated phone going off here and there; the phones were going off in waves (thousands of alerts in total) throughout the entire concert. In regard to your last statement, I would hope that the next few concerts you attend, you end up with someone talking, unwrapping candies, and scrolling on their cell phone (with its sound on) sitting next to you as a test of your definition of “pearl clutching”. There is a general etiquette for the attendance of events that benefit from focus, and it’s sad that the young people that you refer to can’t abide even basic discipline in that regard.
I was there too. At intermission I ran into a gentleman who was asking someone on the other end of a phone call how to turn his phone off. I showed him. I was convinced from the get-go that a huge share of that audience didn’t actually know how to turn their phones all the way off.
I wonder if the sound made by the phone alerts in Geffen was either helped or hurt by the hall’s acoustics? The former Avery Fisher – and prior to that, the former Philharmonic Hall – has been given as many facelifts as those of a Hollywood starlet.
It’s disturbing the way that scientific and engineering principles may or may not not work or, even worse, are totally ignored or discounted.
Well that wasn’t a factor since the sound was coming from all locations of the hall at different times. Having said that the acoustics are poor and unimprovable beyond what has been done. No bass and not particularly kind to solo piano either……..
Your line about the hall “…has been given as many facelifts as those of a Hollywood starlet…” gave me a good late-morning chuckle and is also true, making it even more humorous.
I suspect those scientific and engineering (‘enginerring’?) principles you mention may not have been followed, particularly if someone pre-determined that a smaller hall would be better. Smaller halls can be just as bad – and in some cases worse – than larger halls as we can surmise from what resulted from Geffen Hall’s latest facelift. The size of the hall doesn’t make or break the acoustical excellence alone, but the disposition of the stage walls, ceiling, stage floor, floor slope, and under-stage layout matter as much and sometimes more than audience size. Symphony Hall in Boston which has about 2,650 seats still reins supreme over Geffen Hall with around 2,200 seats and Carnegie Hall which has about 2,750-2,800.
It was a morning concert anyway. They don’t really count.
My fly on the wall tells me that the tremor is actually in Scriabin’s score and that the timing somehow misfired.
People (particularly Amercians) simply don’t care. I find audiences in recent years to be extremely obnoxious.
Very Simple Solution: concert halls should activate cell phone jammer at the start of each concert. Still that wouldn’t stop idiots from dropping their phones during pianissimos.
Or brass players from dropping their mutes.