That Kyung Wha Chung concert

You'll have heard all the rumpus about a great violinist allegedly telling off the family of a coughing child during that comeback recital at the Royal Festival Hall last week. The whole thing is so ridiculous on so many levels that it's seemed best to ignore it. But I hope the following may shed a little more light on the matter, since there's been "outrage" (fake outrage = clickbait) about her action and speculation that it might have put a child off music for life, etc etc.

A musician friend of mine tells me that he was sitting a couple of rows behind the family. He is somewhat conversant with South Korea. He thinks the family was probably Korean and remarked that it is a culture in which elders are respected and speak their minds very directly - rather than habitually talking in riddles and mincing their words as we tend to in the middle England that frequents high culture ("I say, er, please, would you mind terribly if..."). We do forget that not everyone in the world follows our own social mores - and London is an extremely international place.

He added that a) the child looked to be only about 4 years old, and b) the family didn't leave, contrary to rumour, but stayed where they were and seemed to enjoy the rest of the concert without any further trouble.

The online and media bullying of great musicians for the slightest extra-musical flip is quite common these days, especially in this country - and it has got to stop, because all it does is put them off coming back here. We're the losers in the end.

Here is a clip (if somewhat cut about) of the wonderful Chung in the Bach Chaconne. This is why we want her here, and playing, and playing like this.

UPDATE, 9/15pm: KYUNG WHA CHUNG RESPONDS AND EXPLAINS - and does so with admirable sense and sensibility. (The Guardian)

Green light for Lucerne opera house

One of the stranger ongoing legal cases of the music world was resolved last Thursday - and seems set to clear the way for a new opera house in the bijou Swiss town of Lucerne, the site of one of Europe's finest concert halls and a renowned festival.

A flexible-space opera house was planned for the city years ago - an idea spearheaded by Pierre Boulez, no less - and one of the festival's major donors, Christof Engelhorn, pledged more than $100m to back its creation, but died before the donation could be made from his family's trust in Bermuda (the fortune was made in the pharmaceutical industry). The festival sued for the money, in Bermuda - and now it has won. Here's a little more background on the case. There's a long way to go still, of course, and the Salle Modulable's next hurdle will be a feasibility study. But it's a valuable green light and the space will be watched with interest.

Not that one needs an excuse to visit Lucerne, of course (pictured); ever since 1938, when the festival launched as an antidote to the hideous developments in Nazi-era Bayreuth and Salzburg, it has been a flourishing hub of first-class musical activity. The first concerts were held on the lawn outside Tribschen, the former home of Richard Wagner.

Birthday wishes for...

Krystian Zimerman, 58 today. Here he is in a beautiful, fresh, witty and pure-toned performance of the Mozart Sonata in C, K330. Gloriously expressive eyebrows, a tone to die for, and much more. Don't miss the ending.

Fans alert: he will be IN LONDON on 2 July to perform Brahms Piano Concerto No.1 with the LSO and Simon Rattle at the Barbican. Don't miss it.

Wszystkiego najlepszego z okazji urodzin*



(*"All the best on your birthday" - Polish)

Stop the yells

Do you know what you're doing when you yell BRAVI!! a split second into the final chord? 

Especially if there are microphones above the platform?

The orchestra may be recording the piece. If you yell BRAVI - or indeed anything else - before the sound has quite disappeared, you are disrupting the recording.

The entire orchestra will then be kept another half an hour in the hall for a quick patching session.

These days most members of London orchestras, especially the younger ones with families, can't afford to live in London, so they have very long journeys home to places like Tonbridge, St Albans, Lewes or Bedfordshire - when they'd rather be in the other kind of Bedfordshire a little sooner. And with petrol prices high and the congestion charge/parking fees making a car in the capital basically pointless, people take trains. 

Our railways, however, still function on the presumptions of c1958 that nobody is out after 11pm, that nobody has to go on tour early in the morning, let alone on Sundays, and that there are only a handful of people in London anyway, so trains late in the evening are few and far between. 

When you yell before the music is over, and it is not over until that chord has died away, you ensure that more than half those musicians will miss their trains home. They will in many cases have to wait up to another hour for the next one and will get in at some unearthly wee time of morning, completely knackered.

Their spouses will be knackered too, will be fed up with the schedule and may spark a fight. Their children may wake up at the sound of the front door. Everyone has a bad day in the morning, whether at school or at work or on tour. An exam may be shakier than it should have been due to exhaustion. Someone at work may make a mistake in some words or figures or diagnosis. Someone may be late for a vital meeting. And so forth. Everyone does their best, but would have done better still with an extra hour's sleep.

The recording, meanwhile, may be entirely jeopardised. And it doesn't cost nothing to set it up.

This is all because one person in the concert hall couldn't hang on just one second to yell BRAVI.

So please, please, please: THINK before you YELL. 

Thanks.

Free ZooNation! Mad Hatter's Tea Party to be LIVE STREAMED

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party: ZooNation in rehearsal
Photo: David Sandison

I spent an utterly enthralling and invigorating few hours at the ROH the other week watching ZooNation rehearse its new family show for the Linbury, The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, and then writing about it. Huge respect for these amazing dancers who work so hard but manage to create so much fun while doing so. Full feature is in the Independent today along with a photo gallery from the rehearsals.

The show - the first-ever commission in hip-hop style from the ROH - runs from Saturday until 3 January, but the theatre has just announced that the performance on 18 December will be live-streamed on a) the Royal Opera House's Youtube channel and b) the BBC Arts website. If what I saw is anything to go by, it's going to be both terrifically danced and terrifically bonkers - and the tickets have been going like the proverbial hot cakes. Indeed, it's pretty much sold out - just a few tickets left now for Saturday 13 Dec 12.30pm - so you may have to log on to share the fun with ZooNation's dazzling stars Tommy Franzen, Lizzie Gough, Teneisha Bonner and, of course, 'Turbo'.