For Whom The Cell Tolls

This week, as conductor Sakari Oramo, in his New York Philharmonic debut, was wowing a Lincoln Center crowd with Nielsen’s 4th Symphony, a cell phone went off in the balcony, breaking the breathless silence that follows the second movement. Such an event is, of course, all too common these days, but Oramo’s reaction was not: he refused to continue the performance until silence had been fully restored. Justin Davidson wishes more conductors were possessed of such temerity.