A curious incident took place at Royal Festival Hall in London on Wednesday night. Osmo Vänskä was leading the London Philharmonic in Bruckner's Fourth Symphony — employing the rarely heard 1888 edition of the score — when an irate listener got up from his seat and began moving toward a distant exit, shouting all the while. "Rubbish!" "This is terrible!" and "Too slow!" were some of the exclamations attributed to him by eyewitnesses on Twitter. Norman Lebrecht stepped in with round-the-clock coverage of the aftermath, providing not only more on-the-ground accounts but also audio of the incident (see above) and an explanatory letter from the instigator. Fiona Maddocks, reviewing the concert in the Observer, says that the heckler was out of line; Vänskä's tempos were, in fact, "pretty brisk." I've never witnessed anything quite like this in a concert hall, although I have seen my share of disturbances, including a shouting match at a Kathleen Battle recital, the legendary Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Bach-cantata meltdown, and the mystifying "My name's Marilyn Mahler" episode of 2009.
The Bruckner audio was obtained — strictly for research purposes, we can be certain — by the musicologist Nigel Simeone, co-biographer of Messiaen and editor of a forthcoming edition of Leonard Bernstein's letters. There are two other delectable items on Nigel's YouTube channel: a Bruckner Third that goes lamentably awry and a Rite of Spring that meets a similar fate. No, it's not quite time yet for the Messiah on crack, but Christmas is right around the corner....
