Thread: Live recordings. Cough and applause. Can you stand them?

Umm there is a certain sense of pride in being the first who starts to clap at the end of the show and start an avalanche! I did it couple of times...

Sometimes excited applause at the end can really add to a spectacular performance, especially if there are yells of bravo, etc. I've heard this on Martha Argerich playing a Rachmaninoff concert, and recently on a newer Rachmanninoff recording with BBC Philharmonic/Sokolov.

I dont mind applause at the end of live recordings at all. It's just the reaction of the audience. What I do mind is really extreme coughing so it sounds like a 60 a day smokers convention during a flu pandemic. That's not acceptable.

Originally Posted by millionrainbows

The BEST example of extraneous noise I've heard is Sviatoslav Richter's "Richter in Spoleto" recording, done in 1967. As he's walking out on stage, you hear his footsteps treading the boards, and the town bell is ringing in the background! When the opening applause dies down, you can still hear the bell ringing in the first few bars. It's beautiful!

What about the anti aircraft guns in Landowska’s Scarlatti K490. I’m sure you can hear the tension and defiance in the performance afterwards



Or the best of the lot, the infamous Judas heckle

Originally Posted by Bulldog

You and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum on this issue - I'll say no more.

Couldn't agree more with SanAntonio!! (Somebody seems to think a health comment is a political issue!!) I see the original post has been deleted. I'm betting there are many thousands of unemployed orchestral musicians who'd welcome any kind of coughing right now, as many of them are stacking supermarket shelves. In Australia, many of our international Qantas pilots are baristas.

Bring back the concerts AND the coughing - if that's what it's going to take to make us feel alive again instead of the state of torpor we currently endure. As a friend recently quipped, "this is probably the first time in history when the death of a geriatric makes the news!!"

Originally Posted by Christabel

Couldn't agree more with SanAntonio!! (Somebody seems to think a health comment is a political issue!!)

A call for the CDC to be regarded as 'corrupt', plus unscientific nonsense about vaccines based on zero actual scientific knowledge is a health issue, and I'll report anyone that spouts such stuff here. Keep your non-scientific opinions to yourself (along with your virus load) and we'll be A-OK. Share it, and I'll report it.

Originally Posted by Christabel

As a friend recently quipped, "this is probably the first time in history when the death of a geriatric makes the news!!"

And that comment is right on the cusp. First, it's not just geriatrics dying of Covid-19.

Secondly, you quip about your own grandparents dying gasping for breath if you like. But don't do it here. Have the barest minimum of decency and humanity, for heaven's sake.

Stick to coughing and throat sweet stories please. This is not the place to be spreading misinformation about a very serious health problem for millions of people.

Originally Posted by Christabel

Bring back the concerts AND the coughing - if that's what it's going to take to make us feel alive again instead of the state of torpor we currently endure. As a friend recently quipped, "this is probably the first time in history when the death of a geriatric makes the news!!"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Since I've already been censored twice today on this thread for trying to clear up some health misinformation, I'll embed my point in classical music terms:

According to Wikipedia a performance of Bruckner's 8th Symphony was cancelled in 1891 on the grounds that it posed a health concern. See Wikipedia entry for "Symphony no. 8 (Bruckner)":

"...a Munich performance of [Bruckner's 8th Symphony] by [Herman] Levi was cancelled because of a feared outbreak of cholera.."

So was the cancellation of Bruckner's concert a government conspiracy or an exercise in sound mitigation of public health concerns?

Originally Posted by Mandryka

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

I don't know what the poetry means. Benjamin Britten didn't understand what Yeats meant, and he quoted him incessantly!

So I'll share a personal story instead.

Slightly elderly sister, in March, pre-Lock Down, goes to her monthly evening Women's Institute meeting. I tell her not to go, because I don't want her catching anything. She goes regardless, and finds (thank heavens) that the WI have cancelled the meeting pre-emptively. I tick her off for going anyway: her husband is 88 and is ripe for being killed off by her stupidly wanting to share a raspeberry jam-filled victoria sandwich with a bunch of relatively old people.

She sends me a text saying it's all a Chinese hoax, that it was a biological weapon research project that went wrong. I point out that it's either a hoax or a biological weapon, but it can't be both. In silence, she ignores the logic issue. I then send her various scientific articles from Ars Technica, quoting Nature articles and the like, in which they demonstrate by DNA analysis that this wasn't a man-made virus and that it probably originates from bats. She replies, and I quote, 'Unlike you, I don't get my information from the BBC. I have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances from whom I choose to get my information'.

Well, she's an English teacher, so full marks to her for the correct use of the accusative case, but not one of her friends is a biologist, a medical scientist, an ENT specialist, a DNA specialist, a virologist or, indeed, and to cut things short, anyone who could competently advise her on the science of the situation. I haven't spoken to her since, because I simply won't put up with that sort of medieval, Dunning-Kruger type nonsense.

Frankly, the median age of the classical music listener is such as to make most of us here more likely to die of this thing than the average. Thus: I take it seriously. Others are, of course, free not to: but don't share misinformation about it. And don't repeat the misinformation spread by others when replying to them, please.

I am frankly astonished at the lack of care for others that has already been evinced by some of the posts in this thread. Funny stories about throat sweet wrappers are one thing; claims that it's all just a bit of the 'flu and we don't mind the odd geriatric dying early... well, it's just stupid and callous. I don't care what your politics are (and if your a left-pondian, I especially don't care). But this venue is not the place for it. You kill who you want to. This poster is not for killing.

Short version: I will report anyone who posts anything about Covid-19 that is based on opinion, rather than scientific, peer-approved fact. And if it keeps up, and the mods won't react, I will do to TC as I have done to my sister and take my conversations elsewhere.

It depends on what the piece is, how disruptive the noise is, and how good the performance is.

Applause doesn't usually bother me, although occasionally I think there can be too much of it in opera recordings where it occurs in the middle of the music, especially if the performance completely stops or the music becomes inaudible because of it. But this usually happens because the performance just heard was really good, so it's understandable. Applause at the end of a whole performance or act is fine with me.

Coughing is a bit less tolerable for me though. A little bit is OK. I'm pretty sure I've even heard studio recordings that have coughing (Berstein's New York Le Sacre). I can't stand when it gets to an extreme though. Apparently Jon Vickers once yelled at an audience to stop coughing while he was onstage. That's a frustration I can understand! Someone has mentioned before in another thread or something that the coughing is really irritating during the Knappertsbusch Parsifal recordings, especially since there are many quiet parts. I agree. I've found it really hard for me to enjoy the famous Parsifal on Philips because of this. I mean it was Bayreuth, summertime, how was there that much coughing? It can be quite annoying.

Edit: I see someone posted the recording of Vickers yelling, lol.