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Outdoor Concerts - The Puppy Incident

Outdoor concerts can be delightful, especially when the music and the natural surroundings make a perfect mix. Then again, when you’re playing outdoors, things sometimes happen that wouldn’t ever happen in the   concert hall—and I’m not just talking about thunderstorms. I’m thinking of a concert I played many years ago at a festival in France. The setting was beautiful—we were in a valley in the Alps—and the music was Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. What could be better? The performance received an unexpected interruption, however, when a Labrador retriever puppy decided to run up on stage and say hello to all the musicians, wiggling his cute little hind quarters at the audience the whole time. 

Not perhaps, what Schubert had in mind, but everybody laughed, and it certainly made the concert unforgettable. Well, not everybody laughed, actually. The puppy made his entrance in the middle of a cello solo. Our cellist was a terribly serious chap, as I recall, and he was not amused.

This has been A Minute with Miles – a production of South Carolina Public Radio, made possible by the J.M. Smith Corporation.

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Miles Hoffman is the founder and violist of the American Chamber Players, with whom he regularly tours the United States, and the Virginia I. Norman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chamber Music at the Schwob School of Music, in Columbus, Georgia. He has appeared as viola soloist with orchestras across the country, and his solo performances on YouTube have received well over 700,000 views.