I was listening to the National Symphony Orchestra perform the score to a ballet about puppets with a psychopathic streak and I couldn’t help thinking about JD Vance.
To be clear, I prefer not to spend Friday night thinking about JD Vance. It wasn’t the story of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, as outlined by the RTÉ Lyric FM presenter Paul Herriott, that put him in mind either. The US vice-president is not, as far as I am aware, made of straw and sawdust, nor is he involved in a fatal love triangle with two other puppets.
Petrushka was, however, on the bill at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, the last evening I was there, as it was at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, DC, when Vance and his wife, Usha, were treated on arrival last month to a solid outbreak of boos and jeers.
In a video of the incident posted by the Guardian journalist Andrew Roth, Vance seems baffled at first, but he soon reverts to smirk mode, waving regally from his box. So maybe heckles from below such as “Oh, f**k him” and “You ruined this place” weren’t ringing in his ears all the way through Shostakovich’s second violin concerto to the second-half performance of the rage-filled Petrushka.
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Maybe those sustained boos weren’t still echoing in his brain during its playful, shimmering parts. Maybe the bombastic sections helped him lean back and think of Greenland.
The video caught the imagination partly thanks to the perception that classical-music audiences are courteous by default. The stereotype is that they would rather let their hands go numb from clapping than go rogue. The bouquets-and-bowing grammar of concert halls promotes an image of sophistication and restraint in a world where the refusal to rise for a standing ovation is the most cutting insult possible.
Still, I like to think that classical-concertgoers are capable of turning properly hostile if disrespected, a bit like those members of the Women’s Institute who, 25 years ago, slow-clapped Tony Blair when he dared to go party-political on them.
Good behaviour hasn’t always been expected of audiences, in any case. Rowdiness in theatres and concert halls was once the norm in ways that are no longer countenanced. Today’s concertgoers sometimes check their phones, yes, but they don’t usually hurl them at the stage.
Richard Grenell, the Donald Trump-appointed overseer of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, might have branded its Vance-hating attendees intolerant, but their efforts won’t exactly top any ranking of noisiest outbursts at concerts featuring the music of Igor Stravinsky.
I’m not suggesting the “riot” at the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring should be taken as any kind of benchmark. I’m just saying that when looked at through the lens of history, Vance should count himself lucky he wasn’t challenged to a duel.
As for the riled Washington crowd, who wouldn’t be hacked off by metal-detector security checks and a 25-minute delay to proceedings? That would annoy me if it was George Clooney dropping in to admire the flautists, never mind the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
Few present that night will have been unaware that Vance’s boss had already purged the Kennedy Center’s board of Joe Biden’s appointees, installed Usha Vance and other loyalists in their place, fired its long-serving president and named himself chairman.
This Trump takeover of the venue – home to the US National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera – will allegedly usher in a “golden age”, which has the distinction of being cheaper than the “wokey” pre-golden age, with the White House intent on gutting arts and humanities funding wherever it can spot it.
As attacks on culture go, it’s overt. Here in Ireland the political class favours a much subtler way of diminishing the arts: decades of indifference. This is a tale of two concert halls: one the site of viral drama, the other a place where people make the most of creaking facilities in quiet frustration.
It understandably gets drowned out in the din of project-delay controversies, but next month is the 20th anniversary of an abandoned boomtime scheme to revamp and expand the NCH. The venue has long had issues with things that seem sort of important for a concert hall, including the size of its stage, which is too small to fit larger international orchestras.
After years of wistful, stop-start ambitions – fiscal priorities rarely stretch to State-owned concert halls – a more modest plan to transform the venue into a “world-class auditorium” is back in play.
Lapsed concertgoers should load up on cough sweets and visit the existing venue while they still can, as the NSO and various ensembles are scheduled to vacate the Earlsfort Terrace building “in early 2026” and relocate to other, unconfirmed spaces “for a minimum period of three years”.
There’s a chaotic energy to all of this that feels worthy of Petrushka. But who knows? Maybe an uplifting coda is just one extended interval away. If not? Boo.
