TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto #1
DVORAK Hussite Overture
The CSO arranged to have its three
living former (and present) music directors all participate. Barenboim conducted
the Faust Overture; Solti the Beethoven; Barenboim played and Solti
conducted the Tchaikovsky; and Kubelik ended the concert with the Dvorak.
Prior to the concert, the CSOhad a
dinner for special donors who paid $500 per person (or more), and there were
some 400 of them. The dinner was held at the Art Institute. Atdinners of that
nature it is customary to give a token gift to those attending, and so the CSO
did that. (Remember, this was BEFORE the concert--the diners went from dinner
to the concert). The gift was a lovely, specially marked desk clock, an alarm
clock to be precise.
Actually, "precise" is not
the word to use here. What happened is that some of the
clocks were put in their boxes with the alarm switches on. And all were set
to different times (both the clocks and the alarms).
There were no problems during the
Wagner, and during the Beethoven an occasional beep made me and others angry,
thinking that some idiot had a beeper that was going off; but it didn't
seem too serious.
After intermission, though, things
gathered force -- as more and more clocks came into the position where the set
alarm time and the time on the clock matched, and throughout the first movement
of the Tchaikovsky we heard this beeping and couldn't figure out what the hell
it was. Finally,one of my staff members (for newcomers to this group, I am executive
director of the CSO) said "could it be those alarm clocks given out at
dinner?" We got one, made the alarm go off (in the lobby, of course), and
recognized all to well that it was the same sound. That meant that there may
be five or six going off now, but there were four hundred more clocks inside
the hall, any number of which might go off during the rest of the concert.
Barenboim and Solti were looking mighty
pissed at the beeping during the first movement of the Tchaikovsky, but they
stayed concentrated and kept it going. At the end of the firstmovement, Solti
started to address the audience, but I knew that he didn'tknow the real cause,
and he was going to yell at people he thought had beepers. In addition, I knew
that the people who had the clocks DIDN'TKNOW THAT THEY HAD CLOCKS -- they had
gotten a wrapped present and most probably had not unwrapped it. So I walked
out on stage, and interrupted Solti's announcement (he told me later that he
thought he was losing his mind -- "first I hear beeping, then you walk
out on stage and interrupt me-- I thought I was in the loony bin."), and
told the audience that there were some 400 randomly set alarm clocks. When the
stopped laughing, they dutifully took them outside to the ushers, who kept them
in the lobbies until after the concert. The rest of the evening proceeded without
incident!
-- henryfogel@aol.com (HenryFogel)