Bickering Couple Halts Joshua Bell Concert

LOS ANGELES, CA — Joshua Bell, arguably the country’s most famous violinist, is no diva. He proved willing and able to play under trying conditions and indignities when he braved the Washington D.C. Metro during rush hour to play for disinterested, harried passersby as part of a Washington Post experiment that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

So the couple in the front row at the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts in Northridge Wednesday must have been having quite the argument. Twice they forced the famed trio of Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Jeremy Denk to halt their performance, according to the Los Angeles Times.

As Isserlis explained to the Times, their feud was drowning out his cello solo.

“It was so much louder than my harmonics that I stopped, looked at them and was about to start again when they began to argue again, just as loudly,” Isserlis later explained to the newspaper. “I had to stop again and apologize: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you.’ They evidently accepted my apology, because this time they let me start.”

The couple put their heated argument on ice, and the concert was able to go on with Shostakovich's Trio, the newspaper reported. The concert was the eighth stop of their 10- concert U.S. tour.

Check out Bell’s famed DC Metro performance below and the Pulitzer winning story it inspired here.