Yesterday, my quartet played on a street corner for two hours. Seriously. It is a little classier than you may think, though... we were actually asked to do it by the owners of Paradise Bakery. Well, things were going really well. We had about forty or fifty people watching for a good long while, and they were really getting into it. We tried to mix Mozart with some good old-fashioned classics like The Killers, and people appreciated our fine endeavors. So, imagine our surprise when, in the middle of a particularly beautiful strain of Schumann's "Traumerai" we hear a major crunch behind us, followed by a collective gasp by our audience. We turned around to see that a big hotel van had just nailed a (parked) Escalade. But, the show went on without so much as a pause in our music. Later, my friend congratulated me on stopping traffic.
This incident (super embarrassing, I'm sure, seeing as how it happened in front of the largest collective group on the street) brought up a discussion of our most memorable concert experiences. I have several doozies, but I think the most bizarre was the concert I attended last year at Manhattan School of Music. My friend was conducting the "Pines of Rome," and the last movement begins very quietly, builds up in energy and then blows the roof off. Well, the music began, and the audience leaned in to just make out the sounds of the off-stage brass. Suddenly, the principal second violinist keeled over, hit her head on her stand, and lay there on the stage. The conductor wildly grabbed for, and thankfully caught, her violin, but let's just say the mood was spoiled. Eventually, paramedics arrived, the girl was revived and escorted off stage, and the music began again. There really is no recovery for that, though.
I thought this was a pretty good story until a friend told me hers. Apparently, she was playing trombone in an orchestra concert when a woman got up and ran toward the front of the audience. She began to wildly wave a paper over a man's face. Then she tried shaking him. Then she called an ambulance. Then the paramedics came. Then they took the newly-deceased man out on a gurney. And the music never stopped!
This tale has put things into perspective for me. And given me a new paranoia. I'm sooo not sleeping the night before my next concert.
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