It seems that no matter how many great concerts I am a part of in this infinitely interesting career in music, it is almost always the concerts in which something out of the ordinary occurs that is remembered by most. For some unexplained reason, it seems to be easier to recall the show where the first horn player did not show up for the first piece than is to remember that singular stellar performance of a Brahms symphony. The time when a Greek security guard was wresting with a trumpet player just about to play the off-stage Leonore call, thinking that he was trying to sabotage the performance. Maybe it is just me and my warped sense of humor that finds these anomalies to be markers in time.
I listened to a Garrison Keillor monologue last weekend on “A Prairie Home Companion” in which one of the Lake Wobegon characters, Earl, moves away and disappears for a number of years following a particularly regrettable act. He thinks himself forgotten and returns to Lake Wobegon to find that the townsfolk no longer recognize him yet still remember “Earl’s great fart” as a marker in town history.
At last night’s National Symphony Concert, during the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony #6, the quiet piccolo solo was accompanied by a junior high school student losing his lunch in the chorister seats behind the orchestra. So unexpected and startling was this sound that I found myself whipping around to see if what the hell I was hearing was indeed true. As a parent of two youngsters, I am no stranger to vomiting of all sorts, and the sound is quite unmistakable. Hearing this in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was a new one to me. Still, there he was, poor kid, in front of 2,000 concertgoers, barfing up what sounded like an incredible volume of liquid. His mom or a chaperone tried to help him by covering his mouth (like that will hold it in!), but at least someone who cared for him was comforting him. A minute later, he launched into round 2 (how many sodas did this kid drink?). I was praying that it would not rain down upon me, as I sit just beneath these chorister seats. As luck would have it, I was spared. Things settled down and the rest of the symphony proceeded without audience participation, save for the same junior high school students surrounding said hurler, who were uninitiated in proper concert etiquette and provided a smattering of claps between each movement.
So, another concert will go down in symphony lore.I think that it is the human element of our existence that is so utterly inescapable, even in the hallowed halls of American cultural institutions. As George Plimpton wrote about a piece of music performed live, it is “not part of the zeitgeist” and a separate reality is created with the start of each opus. To be yanked from that world by a necessary human act is jolting, yet memorable.
Thanks, kid. I hope that you are feeling better.