Concert-hall design has entered its grand mannerist phase, or, some might argue, its age of decadence. Two years ago, the sensation of the music world was the Philharmonie de Paris, a silver-and-black cultural spaceship that had landed in the Parc de la Villette. This season, it is the Elbphilharmonie, in Hamburg, Germany—a brick-and-glass colossus that resembles an avant-garde ocean liner docked in the city’s harbor. The new European halls seem to be competing with one another to see which can run up the most staggering bills and generate the most outraged headlines. With a price tag of three hundred and ninety-one million euros, the Paris Philharmonie held the crown for a little while, but its notoriety was soon eclipsed by that of the Elbphilharmonie, which took a decade to build and consumed eight hundred and sixty-six million euros. The first billion-dollar hall is not far off.
The conventional wisdom in America is that concert halls have too often seemed like fortresses, and must become more down to earth. Such is not the philosophy guiding the Elbphilharmonie, which was designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron. It towers three hundred and thirty-five feet above the ground, the concert-hall portion of the complex resting atop a massive brick warehouse that formerly was used to store cacao beans. The glass-covered upper structure lunges vertically from the foundation in a way that somehow reminds me of Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig II’s hilltop castle in Bavaria. Yet there are no gemütlich touches. The glass exterior is cool, undulating, shimmering; the brick walls below have an industrial, almost military look. Far from welcoming you in, the Elbphilharmonie glowers imperiously, as if prepared to repel a sneak attack on the Hanseatic League.
As expenses and delays mounted, the Elbphilharmonie—Elphi, locals call it—was seen in some quarters as an indefensible waste of public money. Since the opening, in January, much of the ill will has ebbed away. Every concert has sold out—even the “blind date” programs, about which nothing is divulged in advance. Each day, thousands of visitors take tours of public areas within the structure. The excitement serves as a reminder that classical music has not lost its exalted position in German culture. According to the German Orchestral Association, more than eighteen million people attended classical concerts in the 2015-16 season. The association’s director noted that this figure was considerably higher than the number of people who had gone to see soccer games in Germany’s main professional league.
The interior of the Elbphilharmonie is spectacularly staged. First, you glide upward on what is billed as the world’s first arched escalator—a two-and-a-half-minute ride in a sci-fi-ish white-walled tube. (The journey has been documented in dozens of YouTube videos.) You then arrive at the plaza level, taking in vertiginous views of city spires and harbor cranes. Finally, you ascend handsome, unadorned oak staircases to either of two halls: a large auditorium or a chamber space. The entire place exudes loftiness, in terms of both height and cultural aspiration. Nevertheless, because of public funding, tickets are more affordable than they are at the Met or the New York Philharmonic. Youngsters in sweatshirts and jeans mingle with the burghers.
The large hall, which holds around twenty-one hundred people, follows the now fashionable “vineyard” plan: as at the Paris Philharmonie, the Berlin Philharmonie, and Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, the performers occupy the center, surrounded by terraced rings of seats. Even at the back of the highest level, you are no more than a hundred feet from the podium. (At Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, the distance is a hundred and twenty feet.) The décor is sober and subdued, at least until you get close to the walls: they are made of plaster and are pockmarked by cavities, bringing to mind a beehive or a coral reef. The critic Jens Laurson has written that sitting in the space is like being “on the inside of a gigantic musical animal”—the whale that swallowed Hamburg.
The sound is a mild disappointment, at least on first encounter. The acoustician was Yasuhisa Toyota, who has engineered a string of triumphs, including Disney. His signature achievement has been to add resonant warmth to the clinical clarity that defines so many modern halls. In Hamburg, though, something is off. In late April, I saw a performance of Mahler’s gargantuan Eighth Symphony, with the Hamburg State Philharmonic and two hundred choral singers under the direction of Eliahu Inbal. This score provides a good acoustical test, its dynamic range running from celestial pianissimos to apocalyptic thunder. The former floated out beautifully: the flutes seemed just feet away. The climaxes, alas, were a brittle jumble, missing the mellow blend you’d find in a hall with greater resonance. Also, the bass lacked oomph: when the lower end dug in, the floorboards didn’t tremble sympathetically. Some of these issues can be addressed over time, although it is not easy to change the sound of a finished structure.
The chamber hall, which seats five hundred and fifty, should need few adjustments. I saw the pianist Kirill Gerstein play an ambitious and bewitching program consisting entirely of études: Liszt’s Transcendental twelve, three by Scriabin, two by Ligeti, and several Gershwin tunes arranged by Earl Wild. Here the sound was fuller and richer, though still a touch dry. Rippling oak walls give the auditorium a curious appearance, again vaguely organic.
Soon enough, Elphi will be superseded by some other Instagrammable wonder. For now, the hall has a chance to entice the Hamburg public away from the tried and true. Happily, its artistic team has embraced that mission, offering an inventive array of programming, including a John Zorn marathon and, next season, a Telemann festival. If the Elbphilharmonie can sustain its appeal over time, it will have confirmed what the Bavarian tourist industry long ago discovered with Ludwig’s fairy-tale castles: that extravagance sometimes pays off in the end.
After two nights in Hamburg, I travelled to Berlin to see the latest addition to a crowded musical landscape: Pierre Boulez Saal, a chamber hall just south of the Staatsoper. Boulez Saal is the brainchild of the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who envisioned a performance space and a music school allied with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together musicians from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds. Unlike the Elbphilharmonie, the Paris Philharmonie, and many other high-profile projects—including the renovation of the Staatsoper, which has been going on since 2010—Boulez Saal went up quickly and painlessly. It was built inside a nineteen-fifties building that previously housed Staatsoper sets. Frank Gehry, who served as the architect, first made sketches in 2012, and construction began in 2014. The total cost for the complex was a relatively modest thirty-five million euros.
Even if a mediocre hall had resulted, the avoidance of the usual cultural-political imbroglio would have been newsworthy. But Boulez Saal is a masterpiece of its kind. It consists of two elliptical-shaped seating areas, one on the ground level and one suspended above, each tilted on a different axis. The floor of the upper ellipse also curves up and down, giving the hall an unfixed, fluctuating profile. As in Disney Hall, bright wood tones—Douglas fir, cedar, and red oak—predominate. The capacity is six hundred and eighty-two. Listeners are never more than fifty feet from the musicians, who are often placed at the center of the auditorium. Those in the front row could turn pages, if asked. In all, the atmosphere is convivial and unshowy, despite the flamboyance of Gehry’s swooping lines.
Toyota again planned the acoustics, and his longtime relationship with Gehry—they collaborated not only on Disney but also on the New World Center, in Miami—has again yielded a marvel. On the first night I was there, the baritone Roman Trekel and the pianist Oliver Pohl gave an all-Schubert program: a meticulous, reserved performance in which the subtlest nuances registered. The next night, Barenboim led the West-Eastern Divan in the final three symphonies of Mozart. In the first half, I sat in the upper gallery, and felt that I was hearing these hyperfamiliar pieces for the first time. Each instrument sounded distinctly, and yet was integrated into a resonant whole. Barenboim used forty strings, which in most venues would have swamped the winds and the brass, but here the latter held their own. Down below, there was a slight loss of cohesion and a palpable gain in visceral impact. The “Jupiter” Symphony lived up to its name, storming in the air. Barenboim elicited performances at once weighty and vital.
The modernist master for whom Boulez Saal is named was a relentless critic of classical music’s fixation on the past. Aptly, the hall’s programming honors the present; the inaugural season, which began in March, has featured the Iraqi oud player Naseer Shamma, the jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, and the Damascus Festival Chamber Players (with a program of Syrian composers). Classical music has been recast here as a modern, global, socially conscious art. The singular element is the Barenboim-Said Academy, as the educational wing is known. Barenboim was a close friend of the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, and the West-Eastern Divan arose from their conversations. The academy’s students, who come mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, receive not only musical training but also a liberal-arts education. Mena Mark Hanna, the academy’s dean, told me that one class had been discussing motifs of Orientalism and degeneration in Schoenberg’s textbook “Harmonielehre.” All this fulfills the institution’s Boulezian slogan: “Music for the Thinking Ear.”
In the fall of 2015, Gehry went to Boulez’s home, in Baden-Baden, bringing with him a model of the hall. Boulez was in poor health, and had only a few months to live. Nevertheless, he examined the model for hours, his eyes alive with interest. His understanding of sound was uncanny, and he may have sensed that the structure bearing his name would take its place among the great concert halls of the world. ♦
