Classical phone rage: in praise of concert scourge David Patrick Stearns

The US journalist confiscated a Vienna concertgoer’s phone at a Philadelphia Orchestra performance. But it’s not just their ringing that can ruin a concert…

Kudos to David Patrick Stearns, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s classical music critic, who has done what so many of us have longed to do when an errant mobile phone goes off in the middle of a slow movement – or in this case, the start of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. In the Musikverein in Vienna, where the Philadelphia Orchestra, their music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and violinist Lisa Batiashvili have been on tour this week, Stearns was driven to unusual acts of concert hall etiquette-saving behaviour when a fellow audience member in the eighth row of the stalls was entranced by her phone and an apparently repeated stream of Facebook notifications, emails, or whatever else was more interesting to her than Shostakovich.

Stearns went for it, “American-style”, as he writes. “Yours truly reached over, took the phone out of her hand, and pocketed it until intermission. Another phone (unfortunately out of my reach) went off during Batiashvili’s cadenza. Was it my imagination or did her playing grow increasingly angry? The music takes well to that emotion, and Shostakovich got the most uproarious applause of the night” – even more than the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony in the second half. The person’s reaction to this US Department of Concert Behavior intervention isn’t, alas, recorded.

It's the unmistakable blue glow of those for whom social pseudo-interactivity is more fulfilling than actual performance

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