Violist Lukas Kmit stylishly answers ringing cellphone problem

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The cellphone heard round the world seemed to be the one that rang inside Avery Fisher Hall a few weeks ago during a concert by the New York Philharmonic when conductor Alan Gilbert stopped a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony over a ringing iPhone. ‘Are you finished?’ the conductor asked the culprit.

While theatergoers know these phone interruptions and reactions happen all the time, the Gilbert incident became a talker after it was tweeted, then Facebooked, then journalized and eventually CNN’d.

But that was nothing compared with the creative response of violist Lukas Kmit while performing at a Jewish Orthodox synagogue in Presov, Slovakia. No surprise that this video of Kmit has gone viral. (Thanks for the tip from Tim Mangan on his Classical Life blog.)

UPDATED: Forgive our original headline on this story. As an observant reader has pointed out, the YouTube description is wrong and Kmit is playing a viola, not a violin.

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-- Sherry Stern