One of Germany's leading concert halls has expressed shock after a performance by an Iranian harpsichord virtuoso ended in a tumult with disgruntled concertgoers shouting at him to "speak in German".
"I was shocked and flabbergasted," the head of Cologne's prestigious Philharmonic Hall, Louwrens Langevoort, told AFP via telephone on Wednesday.
"These were elderly concertgoers who showed no respect for the performer, or the music or their fellow audience members and noisily prevented the concert from going ahead," he said.
"If it had been young people disrupting the event, they would have been the first to complain that young people today have no manners. But it's the older people who displayed a lack of education here. We've experienced nothing like this before in the 30 years since the Philharmonic Hall was built."
The incident occurred during the hall's normally rather sedate afternoon series, "Sunday at Four", popular among Cologne's older classical music lovers.
In this particular concert Cologne's own period-instrument band, Concerto Koeln, had teamed up with a rising harpsichord star, Tehran-born and London-based Mahan Esfahani.
The programme featured works by baroque composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach as well as modern composers Fred Frith, Henryk Gorecki and Steve Reich.
Langevoort said that the hall was nearly full with around 1,800 people in the audience.
But things turned nasty when Esfahani began playing Steve Reich's 1967 piece "Piano Phase", originally written for two pianos, but in a special arrangement for harpsichord and tape recorder.
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