One of my favorite classical radio stations is making a meal over measures that one of my favorite conductors is taking to combat coughing in the music hall. San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas now gives away cough drops at concerts. Or at least MTT did so at a recent Chicago Symphony event in which the proverbial throat frogs got unusually jumpy during several quiet pieces. These included a Stravinsky elegy for President John F. Kennedy and an early movement of a Mahler symphony.
The Maestro described the drastic step he took in a recent interview with Elliott Forrest at WQXR-FM in New York City:
“As it happens, just as I had walked on the stage before the Mahler piece I had seen that there was a big box filled with cough drops which is there for members of the orchestra to use it they need it,” Thomas explained.
“So that was in my mind and I thought, it is going to be a problem later in the piece, so maybe I can do something that will be helpful. So I said to the concert master, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.’ I walked off the stage and got two very big handfuls of these cough drops. I came back and said something to the audience like ‘I just happen to have a bunch of cough drops . . . ‘”
Full disclosure: my wife Sharon and I attended an MTT concert last year at the San Francisco Symphony. Thomas came on stage to make some preparatory remarks about a new composition commissioned by the organization. I started coughing just a little towards the end of his talk. We were sitting in the front left of the hall. As the conductor made his exit, it sure looked like he was giving me the hairy eyeball. Back then I thought that maybe I was being a bit paranoid. Not now. Happily Sharon had a cough drop handy and saved me from a celebrity beating.
This is all well and good. Who am I to argue with famous musicians handing out pharynx calming sweets to subscription audiences? But I hope that this doesn’t mean that classical radio deejays will stop playing records in which audience members cough. That would entail, for example, banning one of my favorite live Vladimir Horowitz performances, that of him playing his heart out to Robert Schumann’s beautiful piano suite “Kinderszenen” (Scenes from Childhood).
Listen to this Youtube of the rendition, which is queued up to a section in which Horowitz concludes the most beloved episode of the piece, titled “Traumerei” (Reverie), and begins playing the next section, “Am Kamin” (At the Fireside).
As you can hear, several patrons in the back of the hall cut loose with a barrage of coughing that they simply cannot control. Yet Horowitz continues his marvelous, poetic playing as if recording in an air tight studio. Attention all classical radio presenters: don’t deny your listeners these wonderful slices of musical life because of a few tickled throats!
