Janos Gereben posted an article about irksome audience coughing:

> Have our instrumentalists and journalists grown so frail that they
> cannot deal with a common human noise, a brief and inoffensive one at
> that, usually muffled, unaccompanied by odor? Feh, I say, and fie

It is not the coughing at a concert that bothers me, it is the *timing* of
the cough that I find so audacious and frustrating.  I have seen MTT turn
around and glare at a cougher--It's a good thing I wasn't on the podium.
People should at least wait until the loud parts--that's what I do.  How
hard is it to hold in a cough?

My first time hearing the "Rite of Spring" live should have been an
exhilarating but it turned out to be a nerve-racking one because the
concert, (MTT, SFO), was being recorded live by RCA and Jay David Saks.
(After hearing so many of Saks' distant-sounding recordings I was surprised
to see that the microphones were actually *in* Davies Hall and not set up
in the parking lot across the street).

Anyway, right in the middle of the opening bassoon solo someone sneezed
quite an unmuffled sneeze, and that was only the beginning.  It sounded
like a Moscow apartment house in there.  I spent the rest of the concert
worrying about who would make the next noise.

The next concert I'm going to see includes Ravel's "L'Enfant"--good luck
with that one, huh.

John Smyth