Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2010-02-07 01:33
Our near-record snowfall today in Philadelphia has led to a very rare cancellation of a Philadelphia Orchestra concert tonight, Although their website proclaimed all day that the concert would be performed as scheduled, someone in the mayor's office must have contacted them and convinced them to reconsider because by four o'clock robo-calls to subscribers and a new notice on the website announced the cancellation. The website announcement called this "unprecedented," and indeed it may be that it's never happened before - certainly not anytime I was aware of in the 50 years I've attended concerts. One famous night - it may have been during the record-setting 1996 blizzard - Wolfgang Sawallisch sat on the stage of the Academy of Music at a piano with an incomplete orchestra around him and did a concert-lecture for the small audience about the evening's program, with (as I read in the next day's news accounts - I wasn't there) illustrations on the keyboard interspersed with performances by the musicians who had made it to the hall. As recently as this past December, a snowstorm that set a December record a week before Christmas failed to stop a concert. The musicians, I've been told, are expected to get into the city ahead of the weather if necessary to be within a walk of the hall in case transit and roads are shut down.
I wondered, as this "unprecedented" cancellation was announced, what other major orchestras in cities prone to occasional (or frequent) severe weather do in similar situations. I'm certain Boston, Chicago and Montreal, to say nothing of those northern European cities whose weather I don't know as much about, have more frequent trouble with snow than we do. Is "the show must go on" as much a part of the ethic in other such cities as it has (until tonight) been here?
In no trying to be judgmental - just very curious,
Karl
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