The clap

​I feel an urgent need to write about something which doesn’t relate to Brexit or the Great Labour Party Anti-Semitism Debacle. Perhaps, due to the fact that I’m just recovering from a nasty cold I feel somewhat enervated, drained of energy to tackle these weighty subjects. So it is that I am fleetingly alighting on another pet hate, namely audience applause between movements in works of classical music. I was listening to a BBC Radio Three broadcast last night of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and it was disfigured by precisely this idiotic phenomenon. Do I want to listen to somebody else clapping away whilst the orchestra is girding itself for the Pizzicato ostinato or indeed the Allegro con fuoco? Absolutely not! Might it not be that in those brief moments between movements the musicians might not appreciate an opportunity to get their minds focused on what is to come? I have heard that in the past, audiences would intersperse movements with their applause, but I feel what we have now is a degeneration into that American habit of whooping and hollering at any anything towards which they feel some appreciative emotion. It’s like applause at the end of a film in the cinema. Is the projectionist meant to can it and send it back to Hollywood? If audiences could be generally more diffident, then when they did want to demonstrate appreciation or opprobrium it might have more impact. Or could it be that audiences want to be part of the performance, in the way that the only form of appreciation now thought sufficient stood say, in front of the Mona Lisa is to take your selfie with it? There’s a right time to applaud, as I have referred to in my review of Tectonics (see under Perambulations).