On the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, pianist Stephen Hough started a thread of comments about whether audiences should applaud between movements of symphonies, concertos and other multi-part works.
Hough wrote that composers and performers must have expected applause after the big first movements of the Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Brahms piano concertos, and after the third-movement march in Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (No. 6).
“I don’t actually mind applause either, as long as it’s a heartfelt response and not something that the public is expected to deliver automatically,” replied pianist Marc-André Hamelin. “But, in any case, I’d much rather have applause between movements than cell phones at any moment!”
(via http://slippedisc.com)
The no-applause-between-movements protocol seems to be a product of the early to mid-20th century, possibly an artifact of Victorian-hangover Britain and even more uptight Anglophilia in the US.
Or maybe not. I began to wonder about this when I heard a concert recording of Jascha Heifetz playing the Brahms Violin Concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall in the 1940s. Sustained applause followed the first movement. There was no audible evidence of outrage from the stage, no sign of the fun police being called in to quell the untimely demonstration.
Some 19th-century accounts report applause within movements, by audiences taken with certain themes or impressed by solo cadenzas – not unlike the response of a jazz audience to a improvisatory solo. And, of course, opera audiences once routinely demanded encores of popular or especially well-sung arias. Not that we need to revive those old practices.
Now who’s ready to address the more recent convention of audience appreciation, the obligatory standing ovation after a performance? A standing-O really should signify more than, “Hey, you got through the concerto without breaking a string.”
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