I wasn’t at last night’s concert at the Royal Festival Hall in which violinist Kyung Wha Chung made her first London appearance in 12 years. But on the face of it, what’s been reported by our own reviewer and by the Times’s Anna Picard seems shocking.

“Exasperated by an avalanche of adult coughing between movements, Chung calmly upbraided some parents for bringing along a young child who dared to cough too,” writes Jeal in today’s review.



“Between the Allegro and Andantino cantabile of Mozart’s wistful Sonata in G, Chung turned to the parents of a child, whom I could not hear myself but was later told had been coughing, and said: ‘Maybe bring her back when she’s older’,” writes Picard. “With one shrivelling putdown, a tetchy atmosphere turned toxic.” Jeal agrees - “I can’t remember the first half of a concert ever feeling this tense.”



Both reviewers concede that Chung will have been under enormous pressure on this particular night, but this, surely, is something all top international soloists have to learn to deal with? Maybe the child was coughing continually and should have been at home in bed. Plenty of people of all ages cough through live events, spoiling it for audiences and I dare say affecting performers’ concentration. But to bring age into it seems to me unforgivable. I want to hug parents I see bringing children to classical concerts. This is music for every one, for every age, and how better to experience it than live in one of London’s great concert halls played by one of the world’s top performers? (I personally find far more offensive the oafs who shout “BRAVI” the nano-second a truly great performance has finished, the notes still floating in the air. But I digress....)

If, as Chung seems to be suggesting, we reserve the wonders of Bach and Mozart and Prokofiev et al for when we’re older then at what age are you old enough? Live music is a thrilling and enriching experience and I, for one, will put up with the occasional coughing child if this child comes to love classical music rather than think of it as an intimating, closed and “grownup” world.