excellent blog/article, and it mentions my only real bugbear about audience applause for live “classical”:
I especially prize silences at the very end of a work — that magical moment when a conductor holds the silence as 2,000 people hold their breath, and the sound fades into its own ghostly resonance. Where else in a noisy, distracted culture can you experience such a thing?
I used to go regularly to live concerts (time, other commitments etc) at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, which has a fantastic (tuneable) acoustic and at the end of one well known piece (can’t recall which) the orchestra rises to a huge crescendo and ends on a final, full-throttle chord played by the entire orchestra, the conductor signals the players to stop, and the sound slowly dies away over maybe 4-5 seconds into nothingness and silence. The audience, who would have known this was the final chord (it was a famous symphony I think) sat motionless into that silence, then stood up and gave the longest, loudest, most enthusiastic applause I’ve ever experienced - a truly memorable moment.
Interesting to contrast “classical etiquette” with live jazz where players expect, and get, enthusiastic applause for every solo improv, and even “stuffy” operas where audiences will applaud the end of each act and sometimes outstanding arias (but not Wagner, apparently )