I forgot to mention that my Thursday last week started with my being trapped in my car when its cheap-and-nasty central locking system went bonkers and shut me in (I had to pass the keys out through the window to a mechanic at local garage who got a passenger-side door open) and ended with my applauding in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique*, with the London Philharmonic sitting as far away from me as you are from your mains socket. In the audience two rows away from me (and Richard, who got top seats dirt cheap through his music connections) was one of the five people I shared a corpse with during my brief stumble through medical school.
*[For the future reference of anyone reading this not familiar with his 6th symphony (as I wasn’t), the third movement finishes with knobs-on-eleven and the next and last is more miserable than Morrissey supporting Radiohead. If you forget this then you can excuse yourself by pointing out that it’s now become almost traditional to applaud after the loud bit. Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO were having none of that and already had the next track cued up even as they’d just finished banging their collective heads through the previous one.]
According to some geezer in a letter to BBC Music, you’re supposed to applaud between movements and indeed audiences did so until the new tradition took hold in the 1950s: ” … it distressed [conductor] Pierre Monteux, who said in 1959, ‘I have one big complaint about audiences in all countries and that is their artificial restraintfrom applause between movements … it certainly does not fit in with the composers’ intentions’ … many standard repertory movements (not finales) end with stirring climaxes because composers expected audiences to burst into immediate applause.”
So Jurowski and the LPO were just submitting to the bad habits of modern audiences. Carry on clapping, Damian. You may start a new movement.