This Is Why You Don't Crowd Surf At a Classical Concert

Here's the predictable part of the story: an American was thrown out of a British concert for being too rowdy.

Now for the twists: it was a classical concert, and the American, who insisted he was sober, holds a PhD in chemical physics.

Dr. David Glowacki was thrown out of a classical concert at the Bristol Old Vic in Bristol, England after he tried to crowd surf during a performance of Handel's Messiah, the Independent reported.

Glowacki, a Royal Society Research Fellow, was apparently responding to the exhortations of the concert's artistic director, who had called upon the crowd to “clap or whoop when you like."

“[Glowacki] got very over-excited,” the artistic director told the Independent.

For his part, Glowacki railed against the audience members who chucked him out when he tried to clamber onto their shoulders.

“Classical music, trying to seem cool and less stuffy, reeks of some sort of fossilised art form undergoing a midlife crisis,” Glowacki said. “Witness what happened to me when I started cheering with a 30-strong chorus shouting ‘praise God’ two metres from my face: I get physically assaulted, knocked down to the floor and forcibly dragged out by two classical vigilantes."

Glowacki denied being drunk.

“This may be a consequence of me being American, but I can quite easily be provocative without the need to be inebriated,” Glowacki said.

The Old Vic has now explicitly banned crowd surfing, the Belfast Telegraph reported.

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