Mid-concert selfie stage invasions – hasn't Dvorák suffered enough?
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Version 0 of 1. There’s an episode of Simpsons in which Homer ruins a U2 concert by coming on stage mid-song to boost his campaign to become Springfield’s sanitation commissioner. As the audience boos, Homer explains that he would be, if elected, “the most whack, tripped-out sanitation commissioner ever! Can you dig it?” Not before time the security goons drag him off stage. “Don’t worry, he’ll get the help he needs,” Bono tells the crowd. A video screen behind the band reveals Homer getting his face filled in by the aforementioned goons - totally justifiably in my view - as the band play the richly ironic accompaniment, their song In the Name of Love. Something equally unacceptable happened in London last night. According to a Southbank Centre statement: “An intruder forced his way into the Royal Festival Hall auditorium and onto the stage during last night’s concert and attempted to disrupt the performance by filming himself on his mobile phone.” What the statement doesn’t say is that the man came on stage as Ádám Fischer was conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the finale of Dvořák’s New World Symphony. I know what you’re thinking. Never since its principal theme was used to sell Hovis bread has anything so terrible happened to the New World Symphony. Hasn’t Dvořák suffered enough? My colleague Tim Ashley reports in his review that Fischer shot the intruder a look of “quizzical amazement”, and the Southbank statement notes “the concert continued without pause”. I am in awe: I couldn’t conduct Dvořák to save my life, still less shoot anyone a look of quizzical amazement at the same time. The security staff, who had been massing at the side of the stage, then rushed on and carted the man off. It seems unlikely that the Southbank’s staff “explained” things to the intruder backstage as Springfield’s toughs did to Homer Simpson, though we can’t be certain because orchestral concerts at the Festival Hall don’t yet have filmed backdrops of rogue punters getting theirs. That said, and I’m just brainstorming here, video projections of selfie-taking narcissists getting duffed up backstage seems just the thing to make classical music relevant to today’s kids. But something else troubles me. What kind of dance could this have been given that Dvořák marked his score “allegro con fuoco” and that its lovely theme is usually played so slowly that it’s the perfect musical accompaniment for a loaf proving in the airing cupboard? Good question. Frankly I don’t know but I’m imagining a man cross-dressed in 1979-era Kate Bush leotard and on Mogadon, moving very, very slowly using the interpretive music and movement skills he learned 30 years ago at primary school while the oboist contemplates abandoning their solo and flattening the little twerp. It probably wasn’t like that. “Ádám Fischer’s latest concert with the OAE will long be remembered for its exceptional Brahms,” writes Tim Ashley, and indeed violinist Viktoria Mullova’s performance in general and her rendering in particular of the Joachim cadenza in the German composer’s violin concerto has been widely admired by critics including Colin Anderson of Classical Source. But Tim has long been a cock-eyed optimist: the concert will be long remembered not for the Brahms but rather, as the moment that society went finally to the dogs. No wonder American museums including the Smithsonian have banned the selfie stick that allows you a longer reach when using a smartphone or camera to take a picture of yourself. The world is overrun with self-absorbed imbeciles with more sense of entitlement than sense who think it is their right to interpose themselves between spectators and the music or art or tourist attraction they’ve come to see in order to take photographs functionally identical to millions of others. Which, coincidentally, is roughly what I said to someone who got between me and a Rubens at the Royal Academy the other day to take a selfie. Her preverbal resentful “tut” at my complaint just typifies the smug inarticulacy of the sociopathic type of person who thinks they have the right to interrupt my cultural life. Which, as a matter of fact, they don’t. I don’t pretend to know what the answer is to this trend, but I admit I favour some kind of spit bucket. Not for waterboarding, except in extreme cases, but one that security staff can use if things get tasty at cultural events. They should be empowered to seize smartphones and and cameras and drop them into the bucket, thus deleting photos and making the offender, ideally, die just a little inside. Liberals might whine that this would result in staff being done for criminal damage. Rubbish: no court in the land would convict them - and the rest of us would applaud. |