So I need to vent about my experience last night
I attended an early music concert last night at a small venue. Maybe 50-75 people present. Music was from 17th century Italy. For the first part of the concert there was a constant disruption occurring in the row directly behind me. First it was a very elderly couple, the man employing a walker. They were seated in the row behind me. Early on during the performance, something started alarming almost like a police siren. It was shut off immediately but then went off 2 more times but more muffled in tone. The woman said, “I need to take it off”. Alarm went off again and she said she would try to remove it. Finally they both got up to leave the room to fix whatever was wrong.
Then a woman came in late and took one of the vacant seats. Then a man got up angrily saying something out loud then marched over to a man sitting in the corner-an usher or security? The man pointed angrily in the direction of his seat but getting no response from the man in the corner, went back to his seat sitting down in a huff. Then the elderly couple came back to their seats but one of their seats was taken by the woman mentioned above. They said “these are our seats”. The woman angrily said “seats cannot be saved”. Again the couple tried to claim their seats but the woman again said ”seats cannot be saved”. The elderly woman then said, “where’s my purse”. No response so again, “I’m looking for my purse.” Someone said that they thought that someone had taken it to give to an employee. Meanwhile this elderly couple had nowhere to sit. Another couple motioned to them and said, “we’ll move over and you can sit here” so they were able to be seated. Astonishingly, all of this happened during the performance with everyone speaking in a normal to loud voices. Finally, Daniel Stepner (longtime concertmaster at the Handel and Haydn Society and founder of the Lydian String Quartet) stopped playing and looked at the quarreling going on in the seats behind me. His look ranged somewhere between “WTH is going on” to “well, once you all stfu, we’ll resume playing.” They did indeed finally resume playing but once intermission came, between all the drama directly behind me and the heat and humidity of the venue, I left. There were still some works I was interested in hearing especially Monteverdi but at that point, I didn’t care. Overall just a horrifying experience that made me wonder if this was a glimpse into the future of what classical music will look like 50-100 years from now. I say this because I’m sincerely not sure if these people in the audience were even aware that there was a concert ongoing or just didn’t care. I felt bad for this very elderly couple and the man whose alarm was going off (insulin pump?) but wondered why they were allowed back in during the performance rather than being told to wait until intermission to be seated. There would have been a lot less arguing and drama and Stepner wouldn’t have had to stop the performance. Of course, I felt very bad for the performers themselves at this disruption to the performance. I can’t imagine what these musicians with decades of experience behind them felt with all the commotion. A very disheartening experience.