Local Doctor Saves Life of Brookline Concert Goer

On a Sunday night in early November, Brookline-based chamber music group Mistral began their scheduled performance of “The Walk to Paradise Garden.” Concert-goers were expecting to hear an eclectic mix of string, harp, and flute English composers. Instead, the audience members were witness to a miracle.

Mistral flutist and artistic director Julie Scolnik had performed two pieces already at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline along with fellow musicians cellist Adrian Daurov, violinists Nurit Pacht, Chieh-Fan Yiu, and Gabriel Bolgosky, when audience member and the chair of Mistral’s Advisory Council Sarah Liepert of Lincoln noticed an elderly woman slumped over the shoulder of the person sitting next to her.

“I assumed that the person sitting next to her was her caregiver until I noticed that they were kind of moving away from her, which I thought was kind off odd,” said Liepert. “As they moved away, she continued to slouch further.”

The slouched woman was Ingrid Christiansen of Brookline, a frequent Mistral concert-goer in her nineties.

Scolnik had just picked up her flute about to begin when her husband, Michael Brower, tapped her on the shoulder to tell her there appeared to be a medical emergency in the audience. Brower announced to the audience that there was an apparent medical emergency and asked if there were any doctors in the audience.

Several doctors were in attendance that night, including OB-GYN Dr. Julia Logan and Children’s Hospital ER physician Dr. Anne Stack who quickly came forward. Feeling no pulse on Christiansen, Stack administered two rounds of chest compressions. As Liepert and several other audience members phoned 911, the audience waited silently for several minutes.

“She was lifeless on the floor, only moving because of the violent compressions they were performing,” Scolnick recalled. “It felt like it went on and on. She didn’t look like she was coming back.”

Scolnik, along with her fellow musicians, sat in the front pews in shock over what was happening.

“The audience was completely quiet, deathly quiet,” Scolnik continued. “And then suddenly, we heard some weak crying.” After a few minutes of CPR, Stack heard a few gasping breathes and began to flutter her eyelids. Ingrid Christiansen had come back to life.

However, near death wasn’t enough to simmer Christiansen when paramedics arrived.

“I heard a ‘No, please don’t take me. Don’t take me away. I want to hear the concert.’ People started quietly laughing. It was unbelievable that she was back!,” Liepert recalled.

The events resonated so strongly with some Mistral audience members that according to Liepert one of her "friends immediately signed up for a CPR class afterward. People were very moved by what just happened.”

The intimate setting of a chamber music concert also proved a factor for reversing near death.

“Mistral is a really close-knit community,” said Liepert. "Julie knows so many people and remembers them. It’s like a microcosm of humanity. What a great place to be when something like this to happen!”

The day after she collapsed, Scolnik visited Christiansen in the hospital and gave her free tickets for the remainder of the season after and even played the flute for the smiling Christiansen so she wouldn’t feel bad about missing the concert.

The Mistral musicians and audience did manage to hang onto their humor. During a Q&A at intermission after Christensen had been whisked by paramedics, Scolnik couldn’t help but burst out laughing at one question: “What is the worst thing that can happen at a concert?”

Mistral performed “Here Comes the Sun” as their final piece for the evening, an uplifting anecdote to the tragedy that almost occurred before.

“The music, the feeling, the humanity that comes through Mistral performances was heightened after everything that had happened,” Liepert recalls. “When that piece was over, there was resounding applause. It was almost otherworldly, like being in suspended time. There was appreciation and awe. Like a rainbow after the worst storm.”

By Alicia Landsberg

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