“One of the world’s leading concert pianists angrily exited a performance on Monday evening saying YouTube was ‘destroying music’ after he caught a member of the audience filming him on a mobile phone,” writes Kate Connolly in Tuesday’s (6/4) Guardian (U.K.). “Krystian Zimerman, from Poland, was distracted by the concertgoer while in the middle of playing Karol Szymanowksi’s Variations on a Polish Theme in B Minor at the Ruhr piano festival in Essen…. He continued to perform, but declined to return at the end of the concert for an encore, despite a rapturous response.… Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, the festival’s director, said he felt a great deal of sympathy towards Zimerman, one of the star performers. ‘What happened is theft, pure and simple,’ he told German media. Representatives of the classical music world said Zimerman’s eruption was understandable and welcomed the fact he had highlighted a growing problem. ‘People filming concerts on their smartphones is a problem, and the person who did it deserves to be hounded out of the concert hall,’ said German pianist Sebastian Knauer … who is due to perform at the festival next week.”
Posted June 6, 2013
