Yesterday I got to see the student orchestra from the North Carolina School of Science and Math perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in a not-very-large church sanctuary in Durham. They did a very good job, as far as I could tell, and the room made it magical. A sixty-person orchestra taking up at least a sixth of the floor space—that's a wonderful sound. Having never before listened to the whole symphony at once, I found it deeply moving.
Even better, the relatively small audience gave the performance the same kind of intimacy that I love to find at the barely-attended rock shows I see every now and then, where the performers and the audience create some kind of actual relationship during the performance. With the symphony, I think it came between the movements—the musicians were attuned to the special qualities of the audience's silence, and played their next movement accordingly. So that's why you don't clap between movements…
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