That’s about what I was going to say but much better. I know how to juggle but am awful at it. I can keep a couple of balls up in the air for just long enough for people to say ‘you know how to juggle’ and then they fall. A combination of teaching myself in high school and working at a produce store (lots of bruised produce and free time) and I managed to get just good enough to be at the point where I know how and if I’d spend a few hours practicing I’d be able to keep the balls in air for more than a few seconds.
But with all that said, yea, it’s easy. Even with how not good I am, I’m quite sure no one at the pro level is dropping anything by accident. Even with how not good I am, when I was in college I found a friend at about the same level as myself and with, literally 10 minutes of practice and some intoxicants we could each be juggling face to face and on a three count toss one of the balls between each other.
Also, I recall that when I was first learning how, I could do honeydew/cantaloupes as long as I could get someone to toss me the third one.
Gone off three times, according to the article. Why wasn’t she ejected after the second time or, more important perhaps, didn’t she silence it after the first? I mean, it is easy enough to forget to silence a phone but after the gaffe is found out, do it then!
Depends how far the performer is pushing the envelope of their ability. This is not a performance. It’s justnine balls at a time trial. The record is 11 balls, but that was a ‘flash’, which means every ball was caught and re-thrown at least once. If 11 balls was part of a performance, I’d expect a musical sting to announce the success, followed by balls dropping.
The Flying Karamazov Brothers rarely dropped equipment, except during the audience challenge, where people would bring in odd things to juggle. In once case a bag of flour broke and started showering arcs of white - but the thing that was dropped was two balls connected by elastic. That thing did not travel in a clean arc. I forget what the third thing was.
That’s what I was going to say. What separates the top performers from, say, the community-theater level isn’t the number of screw-ups, but how well they recover from them. Since you mentioned Shakespeare, I know just enough of the Bard’s work to be dangerous, and rare is the show where nobody drops a line. But most people don’t notice, and even those (like me) who do notice mostly don’t care, as long as they keep going past it.
Here is a YouTube link to Brünnhilde’s entrance in the 2011 Met production of Die Walküre, from a PBS behind-the-scenes documentary. This was a rather controversial production, at least partly because of the incredibly elaborate set designed by Robert LePage.
At about 1:35 in the video, Deborah Voigt, playing Brünnhilde, trips on the set and takes a rather nasty-looking tumble. She’s okay, though, and they go right on with the performance.
I was at a concert featuring Itzhak Perlman, when a string broke in the middle of his solo.
And, as everyone who has heard the story knows
He turned to the first violinist and asked to borrow his violin. A stagehand took Perlman’s backstage and restrung it for the second movement. There was applause after the first movement, since he played so well on a violin he was unfamiliar with.
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, 20+ years ago. A Night of Henry Mancini (featuring his daughter on the vocal parts). Here comes the Pink Panther theme: Dead-ant. Dead-ant. Dead-ant, dead-ant, dead-ant and so on. The solo sax repeats the first phrase instead of going on to the second phrase, but slides into the second phrase halfway through the screw-up. A good save, sort of, but that may be the one place in all of music where you don’t want to be that mistaken (major hyperbole alert).
Who cares, any way? I got to hear a wonderful suite from “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” When those dissonant horns show up, the blue-rinse ladies in front of me were cringing–Ew, what is that? That’s the Gill-man comin’ for ya, Bwa-ha-ha, I wanted to yell, but didn’t; the symphony is a refined place, after all.
When I saw The Indigo Girls live, they had two extra guitars set up on the stage, I assume in case a string broke. They never touched them, and neither did any of the backup players. I don’t know enough about guitars to tell what kind of quality they were, but they were propped in stands where they could be easily grabbed with only one or two notes missed if a string broke.
I know from knowing Josh Bell, that even though a musician will have a favorite performing instrument, they own more than one. Josh has a Cremona violin, but he also has a world-class modern one as well.
There are a variety of alternate tunings for guitar. Some songs require the lowest string to be tuned to a D instead of E, for example. If you’re going to play a song that requires a different tuning, it’s a lot easier have another guitar already prepared than to retune the one you’ve got.
But since they didn’t use them, it sounds like you’re probably right. Most bands figure out their set lists for concerts in advance. The only other option I can think of is that the extra guitars were alternate tunings, but they just decided not play that song on the night you saw them.
When I went to Bonnaroo there was a tent for the comedy acts. I went two days in a row. In both cases the opener was a juggler. On the first day, he did some amazing, dangerous things like juggling several running chainsaws, torches and butcher knives while unicycling on a tightrope. He also told a few jokes during the show. I don’t know if he was a comedian, or if that was just his showmanship accentuating the performance.
Anyway, the second day, he seemed a little off form. He stumbled and dropped a butcher knife in the lead up to the big flaming chainsaw finale. He brushed it off with a joke, but he never did finish the finale. He did some more, tamer juggling and told more jokes than the day before, but I guess he just felt he wasn’t up to the challenge of flames, chainsaws and tightrope unicycling that day. If I hadn’t seen that same act the day before, I wouldn’t have known anything was amiss.
I guess my point is that not all juggling is easy, and not all dropped balls are just for show. Good thing that guy had enough talent to continue the set even after he realized the dangerous stuff wasn’t going to work out that day.
There’s also the famous story of violinist Midori, who at the age of 15 while playing at Tanglewood, performing Bernstein’s Serenade with Lenny himself conducting, broke strings on not one but on two violins in one movement. She kept going through it all and finished the piece on the associate concertmaster’s violin.
I’ve never been present for something that momentous, but I do remember on one of my first trips to the chamber music festival in Marlboro, Vermont, having the cellist break a string in the first movement of (I think) one of Brahms’ quartets. In chamber music, there’s no backup instruments around, so obviously they had to stop while the cellist went backstage to restring his instrument. A few minutes later, they restarted the piece from the beginning.
The Met has put in a machine for the latest production of The Ring, and its pieces are controlled by computer. I didn’t see it but apparently early on it crapped out and the Windows logo was projected instead of whatever video image was intended. I cringe whenever I hear about it.
I saw Leo Kottke break a string twice in a single concert. He just used the time to restring and tell long rambling funny stories, which is part of his natural concert flow anyway.
Note that this article is from 2013. That machine is the same monstrous thing that Deborah Voigt fell off of in the video that I linked in post #25.
The Ring is on the Met’s schedule for 2019, with promises that the machine will be “quieter” this time. See this brief article from OperaWire. Of course, the noise was the least of its malfunctions.
Rick Neilson of Cheap Trick uses a different guitar for each song, primarily to show off his guitar collection.
I’ve seen the Flying Karamozov Brothers a few times. The do drop things while juggling, but say, “I don’t think anybody noticed.” Usually, that’s a bad thing to do (don’t call attention to mistakes – the audience often doesn’t notice them), but it fit in nicely with their act.
I guess I’m lucky. I’ve had season tix to the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra for several years now and have never seen a major, noticeable gaffe, nor any broken strings. I watched the Carolina Opera for a few seasons (2008 - 2014) and they never had any major screw ups, either, that I recall.
I think that was at La Scala, and at the end of the opera, the crowd gave the “traditional” response when Pavarotti took his curtain call - they threw ripped-up pieces of paper at him.
One I remember was in a pre-Broadway preview performance of Elton John’s version of Aida (a rare Disney flop, but that’s another matter) in Chicago; in the closing scene, a portion of the set rises off of the stage, with the two stars in it - but when it got about 10 feet in the air, it quickly fell back to the stage. A number of doctors rushed to the front of the stage, telling the two stars, “Don’t move.”
