Philadelphia Orchestra to chorus: Put on masks. Chorus to orchestra: We’re out of here.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is used to drawing attention for its European tours, and is once again — though not this time for its silken sound.

The orchestra kicked up a choral kerfuffle before even landing in Europe by asking the Edinburgh Festival Chorus to wear face masks for this Thursday’s Beethoven Symphony No. 9 at the Edinburgh International Festival.

The chorus balked.

The Beethoven was pulled.

And now some patrons are upset.

Jackie Bruce told The Telegraph that she had bought 10 tickets for the event and was “looking forward tremendously” to it.

“This is absolutely potty — how can a choir sing while masked?” she asked.

Actually, they can. And they have.

This past Saturday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the orchestra performed Beethoven’s Ninth with a masked chorus, said orchestra president and CEO Matías Tarnopolsky.

“What’s paramount for us is that the musicians on stage are safe, and really the only way to do that is to ensure that people are masked unless they play a wind instrument,” Tarnopolsky said Friday. “And we were concerned at the start of a European tour, where the Philadelphia Orchestra is embarking on its first [post-COVID] international trip to some of the most beautiful and prestigious venues in Europe, that everyone stay healthy throughout the tour.”

An Edinburgh Festival spokesperson referred to a prepared statement saying the festival was following Scottish government guidance, and that the wearing of face coverings was optional for staff, artists, and audiences. “We are confident that with this guidance we can ensure the safety of the chorus and orchestra to perform on stage together, and this is currently standard practice in UK concert performances,” the statement said.

The Edinburgh Festival Chorus comes together once a year and is made of 130 singers “from all walks of life,” according to the festival’s website. The festival spokesperson declined to say whether it had received any complaints from the ticket-buying public or requests for refunds as a result of the program change, citing customer feedback as “confidential.” The festival chorus will perform at the closing concert Aug. 28.

Edinburgh is the first stop on a 15-day tour led by music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin that also takes the Philadelphians to Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Lucerne, Paris, and London.

In Edinburgh, another Beethoven symphony was swapped in — the Fifth — but that didn’t seem to placate some classical music observers weighing in on the slippedisc.com blog, which noted the program change a little more than a week ago.

“Cancel the Philadelphians from appearing and send them back to America to ruminate on their decision!,” wrote one reader.

Many others, however, pointed out the tempest-in-a-teapot-ness of it all.

“The audiences of Edinburgh feel ‘snubbed’ because one of the world’s great orchestras performs one of the world’s great symphonies for them? Is this an audience of adults or 5 year olds?”

Even before the Edinburgh program change, the Philadelphia Orchestra had decided to pull some choral works from its previously announced 2022-23 season in Verizon Hall.

Mozart’s Requiem and Rachmaninoff’s The Bells have both been postponed, Tarnopolsky said.

“We didn’t know where COVID would be and didn’t know where masking would be, and had to make these decisions in advance,” he said.

Programs with smaller forces — like The Messiah and “The Glorious Sound of Christmas” — are still on the schedule.

Edinburgh was the only city on the orchestra’s European tour where Beethoven’s beloved Symphony No. 9 had been programmed.

The orchestra has had cases of COVID in its ranks this summer, but not many, Tarnopolsky said. And the orchestra would like to keep it that way.

“We’ve been taking measures to make sure that’s the case, taking the advice of our advisers at Penn Medicine, who strongly counsel on masks for choral performance.”