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Chung, whose publicist said she was not available for comment
on Thursday because she was traveling back to South Korea, took
issue with coughing during the opening piece of her Tuesday
night concert at London's Royal Festival Hall.
Press reports said many adults in the audience took the
opportunity in the pause between movements of a Mozart sonata to
let out their December chill coughs, but the 66-year-old Chung
fixed her attention on a child in one of the front rows.
"Maybe bring her back when she's older," she scolded the parents
from the stage, according to media reports.
"I can't remember the first half of a concert ever feeling this
tense," critic Erica Jeal wrote in The Guardian on Thursday,
adding that after the reprimand, "the audience behaved
impeccably" during a Prokofiev sonata that followed the Mozart.
The Times said the mood in the hall went from "tetchy" to
"toxic" while the Evening Standard quoted a member of the
audience, Ariane Todes, a violinist and writer, as saying the
coughing was "quite loud and seemed quite aggressive".
In October, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas halted a performance
of a Dvorak symphony in Miami because, as he told a New York
radio station afterwards, a child was so restless she had become
a distraction.
Tilson Thomas said he had asked the mother to move with her
child to some seats on the periphery, but instead she left the
hall, to applause from other audience members.
"A performer should not respond to audience disruption,
accidental or otherwise," music critic Norman Lebrecht wrote on
his website, Slipped Disc, about Chung's and Tilson Thomas's
actions.
"A performer needs to be ‘in the zone’, in a separate space, to
maintain an illusion of inspiration that is unaffected by the
mundane. Interventions from the stage can wreck a potentially
historic concert."
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
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