New York is waking up to the concert hall of the future
NewsIn my essay in the new issue of The Critic, I outline the prospects for the transformed David Geffen Hall, which the New York Philharmonic will reoccupy in the fall.
Here’s what I have seen recently in a virtual tour of the site:
‘… The old Avery Fisher Hall used to look as inviting from the outside as Sing-Sing or Fort Knox. If you found a way in through a chink in the fortifications, you faced a row of box-office windows that nullified human interaction. There was little in the lobby to refresh body or soul.
‘The new lobby is something else — twice as big and walled from floor to ceiling by glass so that everything inside can be seen invitingly from the street. The space will be dotted with coffee stations and relaxed seating is provided all around. A giant video screen will show all concerts live and free to anyone who cares to drop in, or watch from Seventh Avenue or 66th Street. This looks like being the world’s first concert hall without walls, and the opportunities are limitless….’
Read on here.
To be fair…the Met has been planning mid-winter “shutdowns” for years (even before Covid). They have extended their seasons until later in the year as well. Not everything is Covid related.
Yes, the current season is every bit as long as before.
The comment about “the world’s first concert hall without walls” seems arrogant: I can think of other places with similar concepts. Montreal’s new hall is a very good example.
For christ sake, Norman — your second sentence wrongly implies that the Met Opera shut down in February because of low attendance and COVID (“The Metropolitan Opera, half-empty, shut down for the month of February”).
In **2018**, the Met decided to go dark in February because its ticket sales have historically been the weakest that month, and extend the season into June:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/arts/music/met-opera-contract-sunday.html
This is factually incorrect: “Opened in 1962 on the site of demolished tenements where the original West Side Story took place, the hall was named after Avery Fisher who made the lead $10.5 million donation.”
When the hall opened, it was called Philharmonic Hall. That was the name until 1973. Fisher’s 1973 donation was to help pay for a massive overhaul of the haul intended to improve the acoustics.
I was in New York last week and considered attending Honeck conducting Dvorak’s 8th. The NY Phil is playing in different venues during construction, and this concert took place in the Lincoln Center jazz hall. It’s naturally a much smaller venue, but the cheap tickets were ~$200 each. With more seats available, ticket prices will drop, but that’s an outrageous sum that would keep away all but a handful of concertgoers.
I’m assuming that’s because all of the cheap tickets were sold out, but it is New York City, after all — a cocktail at a midrange restaurant can easily cost $18. Everything in the city is expensive.
The Phil has adopted dynamic pricing. So last minute tickets to popular events get jacked up to what they can get away with charging. Same practice at the Met, apparently (except that almost nothing has been selling out, so who can tell?).
This looks very exciting indeed. Long overdue perhaps. I remember the Fisher Halls from before the last revision. Last time I saw Mr. Fisher in the hall he named, I shared the story of his growing up in the city with my grandmother. He stopped dead in his tracks in the stairwell and touchingly said, “You just brought me back. I had forgotten.” My grandmother told me how young Abe spent his youth in the basement of the apartment building creating Fisher Electronics. Although the concert hall bears the newer name, it is equally important to reflect and remember some of the roots below the foundation.
Notwithstanding Norman’s typically hyperbolic description of how terrible musical life is in NY (Met cancelled for February without mentioning the normal season is extended into June instead of the usual May) and how expensive it is to live around Lincoln Center (“only hedge funders” can afford more than a shoe box- actually you can rent a 2 bedroom 2 bath apartment for $5500 a month, hardly hedge fund material – those guys BUY apartments for millions. Anyway, let’s hope the hall is as good as it looks like it might be. The NYPO deserves a lot better than the home they occupied for the past 60 years.
You could live in Vienna for a fraction of that and have a higher standard of living in toto!!
We could but neither of us do- do we?
The Hall opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall, not Avery Fisher Hall. In 1976 it was improved and renamed Avery Fisher Hall.
Improved? It went from bad to worse! George Szell cursed the hall in 1962, saying “They should take it down!” And in reference to the hideous brown decor, he added “and they can start by removing the shit-colored seats!”
Szell was there at its opening weeks where it was the worst it was going to be. Subsequent renovations improved it somewhat, but it would never be good. Now, there’s considerable hope for its future.
What would he think of “concrete central”, which is the Sydney Opera House??!!
1973, not 1976.
Do they really still need to have “clouds” in the ceiling? That looks like an admission of acoustical defeat, as it was when they were first installed in acknowledgment that the original Leo Beranek acoustics were awful. I still chuckle over Peter Schickele’s satire of them.
Norman, Geffen Hall does not face Seventh Avenue. It faces Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
I guess he’s thinking of Carnegie Hall…
If a person watched from Seventh Avenue, they’d be in the center of Central Park. If they watched from 66th Street, they’d be looking at the Juilliard Building.
Better to say Columbus Avenue or West 65th Street…
Larry, Geffen Hall does not face Amsterdam Avenue.
It does in the same way that Carnegie hall faces 7th Avenue (sideways).
It doesn’t face Broadway/Columbus either. It’s at a 90 degree angle to the Met, which DOES face those streets.
Geffen Hall faces B’way at its tangential intersection with Columbus and cross intersection W. 65th St. Jeez, I’m tired of commenters including NL who don’t know my UWS neighborhood.
It doesn’t face Broadway/Columbus. The rear of Geffen is 65th, not Amsterdam.
Most people here are confusing Avery Fisher Hall with the Met. The Met faces Columbus.
Broadway and Columbus (not Amsterdam)
How much longer is this pedantic ping-ponging going to go on?
Really, WTF cares.
Columbus Avenue, actually. Amsterdam Avenue is behind Lincoln Center and not in view from Geffen.
I’m encouraged by your impressions of the new hall and hope it will achieve all the possibilities you outline.
But another factual correction: They didn’t heartlessly drop Avery Fisher’s name from the hall; they paid the Fisher family about $15 million to buy back the naming rights.
And yet, still no pipe organ in sight. Based on the article as well as the photo, it appears the possibility of New York finally having a large concert hall with a pipe organ is ‘outta sight, outta mind’. Maybe New York is finally coming to terms with it no longer being a world-class classical music concert city and is humbly accepting second rate? By contrast, Milwaukee recently opened the Bradley Center and they left space for future installation of a pipe organ. St. Louis’s new music director is on record discussing his desire to see a pipe organ installed in Powell Symphony Hall. And I’m not even listing other cities where their city’s prime orchestra halls have pipe organs (Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Philly, Nashville, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.). New York is seemingly pleased to be ‘less than’.
Yes. Those electronic organs are pitiful. The RPO did the Planets at Carnegie recently – really terrific, except for the organ.
Carnegie Hall missed the opportunity to reinstall a pipe organ when they redid the hall in advance of their centennial.
Is a monumental pipe organ a necessity in a 21st century concert hall? Even many new churches are dispensing with them, along with traditional choirs.
Times and tastes change.
Some would say, including me, what you describe is part of our culture’s failing to uphold music standards. It’s along the lines of far too many schools failing to teach music in the schools because “times and tastes change.”
Pipe organ? Please- you can’t be serious. The pieces calling for pipe organ with orchestra can be counted on one hand.
“…counted on one hand…” No, not unless you have a truly unusual hand. There are perhaps as many as 150-250 works which use an organ. Why should any world-class orchestra hall force performers to put up with an electronic substitute when the true instrument sounds better? The real thing lasts substantially longer than an electronic organ.
“Guest”…..one with about 200 fingers on your hands?
Let’s be honest: Not only are there few pieces in the orchestral repertoire that call for a pipe organ, but among them, probably half only use the organ for a minute or two. Further, I’m sure orchestras regularly go an entire season without playing any of these pieces.
If they do go an “entire season without playing these pieces”, it’s probably because they don’t have a pipe organ in their home concert hall.
Quite so. Klemperer was asked to do Enigma Variations at the Festival Hall in London in the early days before the organ was installed. He refused. I would imagine he refused rather colorfully.
Bradley Symphony Center
Yeah, nobody gives a shit if there’s an organ except organists. Literally doesn’t matter
Er…..no.
7th Avenue ends in mid-town at Central Park….unless they are putting in screens a mile away….
Note: I have been to Carnegie Hall six times since the beginning of the year, and it was at least 95% full each time. Concerts are doing well in New York.
Me too. You’re right. The VPO was totally sold out for all 3 with YNS replacing the “stained by association” Gergiev.
Maybe it is safer to say that concerts are doing well at Carnegie Hall. Not sure it follows that things are going so well everywhere…but it would be welcome news if so.
I have had almost the same experience; one of the concerts at Carnegie Hall was only about 80% full. Many of us are hungry for live music, and the concert schedules are still slim.
Please, boys – get it right this time!!! It’s been a worthless barn since its 1962 opening. It’s such an embarrassment.
I’ve seen one concert at David Geffen Hall in my life, 10 years ago sitting in a side box, and all I can remember thinking is, why is my seat not angled towards the stage? Why is it facing straight across the hall? What is the point? My neck wasn’t thanking me after the concert.
It looks like they copied everything off of the LA Philharmonic’s Disney Hall…
“A very good place to start….”
But you couldn’t see into it from Seventh Avenue except with a telescope, maybe. “Ninth Avenue,” aka Columbus (or Indigenous People Avenue), yes.
The artist renditions look very nice. Too bad no one consulted the musicians about backstage conditions. I have it on good authority that, for example, there are actually more stairs to negotiate to get to and from the stage to the double bass room than before the renovation.