Hearing Aids vs. the Concert Hall
By Sedgwick Clark
Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . stuttered a dying hearing aid battery during Carnegie Hall’s Boston Symphony concert last Monday (2/1). Heads turned throughout the audience, trying to locate the high-pitched nuisance. Announcements were made before each of the Ravel works on the second half of the program, but to no avail.
It’s safe to say that neither artists nor audience members with adequate hearing could concentrate fully on the performances. But the BSO under James Levine still managed an authoritative reading of Elliott Carter’s Dialogues for piano and orchestra with soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a rousing Berlioz Harold in Italy with the orchestra’s rich-toned principal violist, Steven Ansell, Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand with the masterful Aimard again, and the Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloé.
My most vivid recollection in this regard was a Philadelphia Orchestra concert conducted by Eugene Ormandy at Lincoln Center on April 23, 1973, when a hearing aid accompanied the Mahler Tenth continuously from first note to last. Ormandy probably had something else on his mind, for he had received a letter stating that he would be shot during the concert if he didn’t perform Deryck Cooke’s 1972 revision of the score instead of the 1964 version. To stem the death threat, a note on the program page explained that he couldn’t conduct the ’72 revision because another conductor had exclusive performing rights. As I recall, the performance was on the fast side.
Lincoln Center tried to solve the hearing aid dilemma in the 1980s. An article in the Times reported that LC’s P.R. director, Joe McKaughan, had pinpointed several of the worst offenders (usually old men) and enlisted the ushers to keep their eyes out for them. LC certainly didn’t want to discourage faithful music-loving subscribers from attending, Joe said diplomatically, but the ushers would be ready with a gentle reminder if one of them misjudged the volume control.
Couldn’t a neighbor have asked the offending noisemaker to desist? I’ve done that in the past. In my opinion, Levine should have stopped the orchestra, turned to the audience, and announced that the concert could not continue until the intermittent noise was located and turned off, which is what Erich Leinsdorf did at a New York Philharmonic rug concert back in June 1977. A camera was discovered, its piercing whistle extinguished, and the concert resumed.