Do you do it sitting down or standing up?

[richardfinegold]

Don't the young men ever yelp? Are they born with better manners, or just emotionally repressed?

They are to busy swilling beer and urinating in public

[jayne lee wilson]

I simply report what I have seen. Perhaps men show their enthusiasm in other ways; or perhaps their yelps are lower in pitch so do not carry so gratingly.

Ah, so that's after their angelic voices have broken, right..... So the females are at least teenagers whooping at their Mahlerian ecstasies, (where once we might have screamed (or thwceamed) at The Beatles...)

I've been in a few dress-circle standing ovations at Mahler symphonies in Liverpool. Plenty of middle-aged baritone whoops among the mixed-gender bourgeoisie in there... I may even have added a contralto one myself.

[mahlerei]

I really don't mind yelps/whoops, be they of the baritone or contralto variety, except when they intrude on the performance itself. All too often there seems to be a competition as to who can jump in first, and that means a yelp before the music is even finished. Bad enough at a one-off concert but a constant bugbear on a recording.

[Conchis]

I've given two standing ovations in my life:

1) Derek Jacobi as Cyrano de Bergerac, Barbican Theatre, 1983: I have a feeling this wasn't entirely deserved. In mitigation, I was only 16 and was one awe of D.J., whose star turn as Claudius was still (relatively) fresh in my mind. He was excellent, of course (he's rarely anything less) but I think a lot of it was down to his formidable technique rather than inspiration.

2) a Serbian pianist (whose name, unhelpfully, I can't recall) who performed Prokofiev's 5th Concerto with the Orchestra of Opera North at Huddersfield Town Hall in February of this year. It seemed to be a fine performance (though I'm far from being the perfect judge); but the pianist had come across as so heroically modest in the pre-concert interview I saw and seemed such a humble soul, as well as a fine musician (who had had a tough-isn life and career) that my ovation was more for the man than for the performance.

On the whole, I think S.O.s are phoney and I'm resolved not to give any more.

[Dave2002]

They are too busy swilling beer and urinating in public

Surely not in your state!

[ardcarp]

On the whole, I think S.O.s are phoney

In the ardcarp household they are known as standing ovulations. But that's probably TMI.