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An Opinion About the Acoustics of the New York Philharmonic's Rebuilt Hall
LAST NIGHT, WE went to hear the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall. This was the third time we've gone to see the Philharmonic since it unveiled the $500 million renovation of the venue, totally reworking the much-complained-about structure once known as Avery Fisher Hall.
The Philharmonic is very proud of the renovation. Geffen Hall is meant to be the physical manifestation of the orchestra's institutional future, and it gained even more symbolic weight as a monument to the triumphant return of live performance from the silence of the pandemic. Even after we'd bought a four-concert subscription, to do our part and to see the new auditorium firsthand, we got a marketing call from the Philharmonic inviting us to come and see it even sooner.
I was glad that the Philharmonic was so glad about it. By the standards of my musically sophisticated household, I'm an ignoramus and philistine about classical music, but I have a patriotic enthusiasm for cultural institutions like symphony orchestras in general, and for the idea of the great symphony orchestra of the great city of New York in particular. And for personal reasons, I'm more or less totally in the tank for the Philharmonic.
The new look of the place, however, has not won me over. The renovation, which was meant to make the building more up-to-date and approachable, leaves me uneasy; I want a little formality around high art. The wide, low entry lobby, where in good weather they’ll open the glass front and let people come in and watch the orchestra on a video wall, has the precise visual cues of the baggage claim at a really nice contemporary airport. There is a restaurant somewhere in the mix, to encourage people to see Geffen Hall as a multipurpose lifestyle destination, and by intermission last night the stairwells and concourses all the way up to the second tier smelled like a grill exhaust vent. Inside the hall, the fabric on the seats is not timeless cultural-space plush red but mostly blue, with the kind of arbitrary slashes and blobs of color that evoke cruise-ship carpeting or motorcoach upholstery. The stage floor is done in that same trendy desaturated wood that's taken over the NBA, which led the NBA to ban cream-colored uniforms because its virtual-ad projection technology kept mistaking the players for the playing surface.
There are very cool and cute hanging lights, though, that flash on and off and do a little down-and-up dance to signal the start of each performance. The audience laughs and cheers for them each time.
But none of this matters! The reason you go to a symphony hall is to hear the symphony. The reason the building once known as Avery Fisher Hall needed $500 million in work was that it had, by consensus, never sounded good. Partial renovations and adjustments through the years had tried to address the problem, but nobody was ever satisfied.
Now the performance space has been torn apart and completely rebuilt. In the process, it has attained its own nested sponsorship identity: the Wu Tsai Theater in David Geffen Hall. We have heard three different programs, under three different conductors, in the Wu Tsai Theater in David Geffen Hall, from balcony seats at both sides. How did it sound? The acoustics were
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