Following André Markowicz’s article published last week on the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert at the Philharmonie de Paris, we received this first-hand account from a member of the audience. He recounts, from his seat, the music and the emotions of that evening on November 6, 2025: drones flying over the building, interruptions, smoke bombs, the Israeli national anthem as an encore. Through Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, this account questions what a concert can achieve when current events intrude on the very heart of the listening experience.
The morning began with a drone. I had risen at 4 AM to catch the 6:40 flight to Frankfurt from where I’d be eventually slinged to Paris.
The approach to Frankfurt was barren. A drone had been sighted and for about 30 Minutes the pilots had to keep the plane on station.
Once I had arrived my connecting flight had already departed. Given the delay the anticipation of dashing through Paris to the scheduled dinner meetup increasingly looked unattractive. The following four hours of Frankfurt airport ambience did not increase my desire for a vegetarian meal being the first stop in the capital of refined dining. Especially considering the company of a bunch of somewhat stereotypical German academics maintaining rather protestant persuasions versus indulgence.
Alternatives were due. A quick look in the concert calendar revealed a more intriguing prospect: Philharmonie Paris – Grande Salle, Andras Schiff with the Israel Symphonic Orchestra under conductor Lavav Shani.
Andras Schiff?!
Did he even play anymore?
Sold out.
Doesn’t matter. I went anyways and ChatGTP rendered me a nice background for my smartphone:
Aptly equipped, I stood in front of the rather impressive gleaming pile of organic metal that the Philharmonie Paris appeared in in the full moon light of this November evening.
Cops everywhere. Above me a drone, inaudible but clearly present with lights blinking red and green alternately. It sat so still and unweaving as if nailed to the sky that I wondered if there was a tower whose lower part I for some reason couldn’t see.
Rarely had I encountered such a police presence in the premises of a concert hall. A week shy of the tenth anniversary of the Bataclan attacks, their memory was obviously not only on my mind.
Hundreds and hundreds of people passed me on their way into the concert hall. It was five minutes to eight and I was ready to give up as a young woman approached me. I had been ready to spend 100€ – but she had a ticket for 30€. Happiness. Once our transaction had concluded she quickly disappeared into the masses. Only to then sit next to me for the evening, clearly not interested in any contact. Cheap but good seats in the top row, center, behind the orchestra.
I will remember this concert forever. Not only musically.
The program for the night was Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. There were four attempts to disrupt Beethoven’s concerto during the first three movements. The first involved a noise generator that produced a modulated siren-like wail. Shouting, scuffling, people were removed relatively quickly. A brief silence, cries of outrage, then applause swelling, defiant, proud.
The conductor thanked the audience, asked for quiet, and the orchestra resumed playing. Five minutes later, just as everyone was getting back into the music, the second attempt. Again using a noise generator. This time, it was not only the security seeing the person rather ungallantly through the nearest door. Now the audience was all there. Defiant and proud. The concert hall was full – 2,400 people who wouldn’t have it.
Time passes, slows. Music fills the hall. During the nocturne of the piano concerto, which captivates with its magical concentration, suddenly a person jumps on the seat and lights a Bengali flare.
He is just to the left of me behind the stage. People scatter in the first moment. And then it kicks off. Three or four guests tackle him before security arrives and beat him up despite the bright burning fire. He almost falls from the balustrade onto the concert podium. Security fish him out, which was probably lucky for him. Things became pretty heated and it took more than a moment for something resembling calm to return.
Which looked like this:
Smoke was hanging in the hall. Schiff and the orchestra had left the stage. Firemen were searching the rows.
The audience was combative, clapping, and singing.
After what seemed like a long moment, Shani, Schiff and the orchestra enter the hall again. Thunderous, stomping applause. The orchestra sits down and picks up where it left off. The smoke hangs low in the hall.
The music continues.
Then perhaps ten minutes later, the second Bengali flare. To the left where the noise generators had rang before. This time, security is quick to take the flare away and carry it outside. Proudly running like bearers of an Olympic torch. Meanwhile the perpetrator felt the displeasure of the closest audience members, and not only in verbal ways.
Now the smoke in the hall was even more dense.
This time the orchestra remained in the hall. The audience applauds louder, even more defiantly than before. Everyone in the hall knows that this is no ordinary evening. The music proceeds without further disruptions. Schiff’s playing is clearly affected, not always entirely confident, but all the more enthusiastic.
After the intermission the orchestra gives Tchaikovsky’s 5th—an absolutely incredible performance. It is a piece I know well as I have a soft spot for this kitschy gem (as I do for Tchaikovsky’s 6th). It is a furious, loud, intense spectacle. Still the individual instruments’ voices remain present, rendered intelligible. Shani goes full throttle, as they say. And not just once.
The applause at the end is unbelievable. I am deeply moved; I have never experienced such applause, such cheering and solidarity from the audience. This volume and intensity went right through me, and I wasn’t the only one.
Two encores, the second being the Israeli national anthem, 2000 people standing, followed by thunderous applause, shouts, standing ovations.
It is always dangerous to read too much into the run-down of symphonic concerts. At the same time the order is a medium through which conductors and orchestras communicate. Here the program was Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto—called Emperor—and Tchaikovsky’s 5th— with its famous fate motive. Beethoven composed the 5th Piano Concerto when Vienna was under siege by Napoleon. He hated the thunder of the canons. Tchaikovsky’s 5th and its fate motive has a colourful history of appropriations in wartime as well as being read as a monument to self-doubt and inner crisis with a rather ambiguous finale.
For Beethoven the bombardment of Vienna was the moment where his affections for Napoleon collapsed, to which he only a few years before had dedicated his 3rd Symphony. The 5th Piano concerto only superficially seems triumphant but deeply dives into doubt bargaining for artistic agency. There are many moments in this piece where Beethoven guides rather triumphal sounding motives through instrumental, dynamic and harmonic alterations into the twilight of hesitation, even confusion. Far from warmongering, it is certainly resolving around questions of cultural, artistic and moral identity under existential threat.
And perhaps few canonical pieces offer stronger material dealing with cyclical trauma and ambivalent triumph than Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. Tchaikovsky’s 5th is all but about survival. It’s a piece that attempts to navigate the complex relation between private grief and public resilience, of reoccurring private and public injury. Harmonically and rhythmically Tchaikovsky continually destabilizes and erodes the seemingly clear romantic progression of the music towards triumphal resolve. The piece envelops the listeners into highly conflicting affective trajectories where courage, vulnerability, grief and ultimately renewal coexist. The latter breathes through the colorful finale and yet questions remain. Especially in a hall filled with smoke.
The conjunction of these two pieces with their rich and multifaceted histories, not least rendered more complicated by the relation of the nationalities of the two composers to Jewish life, certainly piques the curiosity of an attentive audience.
Classical music in its best moments is about negotiating complex emotional architectures both via offering the listeners to be deeply affected into their bodies as well as enabling them to observe these very processes of affection.
Both pieces were driven by Shani and the orchestra dynamically beyond themselves. The quiet movements were very delicate, very expansive, in almost Wagnerian tone painting, ambient. At times, they were almost stretched to the point of deconstruction. The fortes then followed with a force and volume that I have never heard before in a symphonic concert. Almost absurd, tipping over into caricature – despite all the fun to be had in the furor that was obviously present. The hall literally shook, it was dynamically exhausted.
The first encore after this spectacle went into the opposite direction. “Nimrod” from Edward Elgar’s Engima Variations. A piece that begins as quiet and silently as it ends. Again, a piece that carries rich connotations within the historical contexts of its uses and performances.
Nimrod was played by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra consisting of Israeli and Palistinian musicians under Shani’s teacher Barenboim at the historical Ramallah concert in 2005.
The piece’s name is referring to Elgar’s friend August Jäger. The surname translates to hunter, hence the refernce to the biblical hunter Nimrod. Elgar himself had linked the piece to Beethoven and the Adagio of the Phatetique in particular.
The piece is commonly interpreted to be about friendship and consolation in difficult times. Then again, the history of its reception is further complicated by its use as remembrance music in Great Britain after WWI and was broadcast by the BBC from 1928 onward on November 11 – Armistice Day – the day the armistice between the allies and imperial Germany was signed.
After WWII, the second Sunday in November became Remembrance Day. And Elgar’s piece an integral part of mourning the dead. The Paris concert was three days before the second Sunday of November.
The interpretations of Nimrod’s use in Great Britain are certainly not clear cut and highly ambivalent. It can be read as a solemn hymn to imperialism but also as an empire’s melancholic echo, as imperial nostalgia.
At the same time many interpretations deem Nimrod as a neutral, non-nationalistic grief music overcoming national divisions. In his speech at the Ramallah concert, Barenboim explicitly refered to Nimrod as a commemoration for the suffering and death on both sides. It is such interrogating, rewriting and rewiring the ambivalences of music and its uses that classical music progamming affords. Shani’s choice to end the evening with this very piece that fades into solemn silence is hardly coincidental.
Perhaps the protesters should have informed themselves about the conductor. An outspoken critic of the current Israeli government and its politics. A pupil of Daniel Barenboim with his lifelong quest of facilitating Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. About Schiff, who too is an outspoken critic of authoritarianism.
Perhaps the protesters should have listened and studied the history and context of the pieces they chose to disrupt.
Two composers of failed empires and not entirely clear-cut interpretations in a hall filled with smoke.
With drones above the roof, which were still there when we left the hall almost at midnight.
A sea of police cars awaited us on the way to the subway and the parking garages. For a long while I stood on the Paris Philharmonic’s balcony overseeing this scenery. Eventually my feet took me towards the subway. The drone suddenly was gone. Searching for it – and that ominous tower – across the clear November sky I witnessed its silent descent towards two policemen who picked it up as soon it touched terra firma.
