The audience was asked to withhold applause until the end of each of the program's three segments.
With the audience already stunned into silence, the projected request to withhold applause for a moment of silence was almost unnecessary.
Speaking from the stage, Mr. Vanska introduced Sibelius's "Valse Triste," describing it as a dance of death and asking the audience to withhold applause at the end.
In typically self-effacing fashion, he asked the audience to withhold applause at the end, and listeners filed out quietly, many in tears.
It's hard to withhold applause from a book that takes up the lost cause and the soon-to-be-lost art of folk tales.
On stage at the 1998 premiere of Ned Rorem's "Evidence of Things Not Seen," they canceled intermission and asked the audience to withhold applause until the end of the 36-song work.
But on Monday night, instructions by NBC's Brian Williams to a debate crowd in Tampa, Fla., that the audience should withhold applause until the end of the event resulted in a different dynamic.
In his first event of 2010, at the Masters, Woods received a mostly warm reception from the galleries at Augusta National Golf Club, although many spectators withheld their applause as he approached greens.
Nixon had famously withheld his applause when Goldwater declared, at the 1964 Convention, that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"; two years before that, he had been badly bruised by the society during his failed run for the governorship of California.
But why not request that the audience withhold applause in recognition of the day's events, making the occasion meaningful and memorable for listeners and performers?
