Conductor halts performance after cell phone ring

When a mobile phone went off during a New York Philharmonic performance the conductor saw red, stopping the orchestra in its tracks. Orchestra music director Alan Gilbert was so appalled by the continuing distraction during one of the most poignant parts of the performance that he brought the musicians to a standstill. The phone’s ‘marimba’ ring-tone went off from a front row seat of New York’s Avery Fisher Hall. The untimely interruption happened during the final and most moving bars of Mahler’s Ninth symphony, just 13 bars before the beginning of the last page of the score. More