Just in: Berlin hires Frank Gehry, 86
mainThe architect of Los Angeles’s stunning Walt Disney Hall and Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum has been booked to design a production for Berlin State Opera. It’s Glück’s Orpheus and Euridice, director Jürgen Flimm, conducted by Daniel Barenboim in March 2016.
Gehry has only designed one opera before – Mozart’s Don Giovanni in LA, 2012.
He is presently working on a concert hall for Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Berlin.
Hasn’t Berlin suffered enough from modernist monstruosities?
Gehry is designing a new concert hall with 622 seats not for the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, but for the Barenboim-Said Academy.
Poor academy! That orchestra is all about harmony and integration and now they will be wrapped in chilly dissonance. I bet the players’ intonation will begin to falter and all Barenboim’s efforts will disintegrate. They should have chosen a classical architect like Quinlan/Francis Terry, Alan Greenberg, Leon Krier or Demetri Porphyrios.
Also, this project apparantly is, aesthetically, an outdated idea, not really symbolizing the current Berlin, where a quite different building project is rising:
http://johnborstlap.com/reconstructing-cultural-identity/#more-1097