The audiences at classical song recitals do not whoop or jig about as a rule. But even the most reserved Wigmore Hall audience is lively compared with the catatonic atmosphere that greeted Owen Webb in the day room of the retirement home.
As his accompanist paddled out the introductory chords to Some Enchanted Evening, the young Welsh baritone made a spontaneous decision to try to jolly the atmosphere. He will remember the upshot for the rest of what promises to be a distinguished operatic career.
"This little old lady in the front had her bag out and was fidgeting with it," he recalls. "I went over to her, went down on one knee and held her hand . . . but I could soon see she wasn't up for it."
Too late to withdraw. He had committed himself.
"She told me to fuck off, which was nice, and I did," Webb says. "I went over to somebody else and luckily didn't get the same response."
Webb had got the gig via Live Music Now (LMN), a scheme set up by the late violinist Yehudi Menuhin to help young musicians at the start of their careers and to bring live performances to the disadvantaged.
The programme, which has just celebrated its 25th anniversary, organises 3,000-odd recitals a year for artists to perform to audiences who would never otherwise hear music live. The venues include homes for people with dementia and for children and adults with special needs, psychiatric hospitals, refuges for the homeless and prisons.
In practice, this means that a large proportion of the venues are much more challenging than those normally faced by most classical performers.
For other performing artists - stand-up comedians or pub singers, in particular - hostile audience feedback comes with the territory. But fledgling cellists or mezzo sopranos, say, might well have known nothing but adoration or admiration from audiences bolstered by family, friends and fellow students.
With a few notable exceptions (the Parisian audience for the premier of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1911, for instance, is said to have rioted) classical audiences are unfailingly polite, which is not helpful to a performer.
Owen Webb says he learnt valuable lessons from his first LMN bookings, principally the need to double the energy of his performances to get across to the audiences. But then that doesn't suit all tastes.
"In a dementia home for the elderly in south Derbyshire, I'd just started the Toreador song when a woman in the audience shouted for me to shut up. So I sang it a bit quieter. It's quite hard to know what people mean in these situations. 'Shut up' could be what they say to everything, or it could be an expression of appreciation."
Not all singers are blessed with Webb's robust temperament. Some try LMN once or twice only, but he keeps coming back and recently chalked up his 50th gig for the scheme while pursuing a burgeoning career in opera and on the concert platform.
The rewards, he says, go far beyond the valuable lessons that a challenging audience teaches: "The good responses are when you hear after the concert that some of the patients who have been singing along with us might not have spoken for a few months."
Verica Marzelina, a young soprano who qualified as a doctor in Belgrade before coming to London to complete her musical studies, has loved her three LMN recitals. "You can't be self-centred," she says. "You don't think about what would show you off best but think about the audience: what would they like? It's going back to the important things."
Webb agrees it is essential to give a broader range of pieces than the normal repertoire, which inevitably means Disney songs in children's homes. But Ian Stoutzker, LMN chairman, cautions against forsaking the classics. "I've seen it again and again in places where people can't control their reactions, when they're screaming and having convulsions, that the more classical the repertoire, the more tranquil it gets," he says. "Play them a Schubert trio and it has a really calming influence."
