Not Even a Knee Click in the Royal Albert Hall - Asides (XIX)

 

Making it on time for last night’s Prom at the Royal Albert Hall was a challenge. Overburdened buses wouldn’t stop to take on fresh passengers, and the Tube was on strike. Yet the chance to see the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for the very first time would surely make the westward trudge worthwhile.

I wasn’t wrong. The music was sublime. Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 (‘The Prague’) metaphorically mopped my brow after the long walk. The advice to listen out for the woodwinds was wise. The flute in the third and final movement danced its way around the auditorium, calming me down for the sombreness that was to follow after the interval.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (photo by Chris Christodoulou)

Along with ‘The Heiliger’ from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, and Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’ from his Symphony No. 5, the closing movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth and final symphony stills you completely, almost to the point where you forget that you are breathing. As the final notes of the strings and then the bassoon descend and then die away into a silence that the conductor holds for what seems an age - almost thirty seconds, listening back - you are left alone in the midst of mortality: not just your own, but the composer’s too. A couple of weeks after he completed and conducted this piece, Tchaikovsky was dead, either through cholera riddled drinking water or by his own hand.

Thinking back to last night’s silence was instructional. An audience of nearly 6,000 people who had failed to restrain themselves from fidgeting or coughing - or standing and hearing the click of their bad knee, mea culpa - at the end of each movement, did not make a sound in those thirty seconds. Every one of us within the Albert Hall was alone in that silence, experiencing the true lesson of John Cage’s 4′33″, that silence can sometimes be more profound than music.