NEW YORK – New York is getting a brand-new concert hall in a 60-year-old building.
On Saturday, the public will get its first interior glimpse of the renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Centre, the result of a whirlwind construction project that was decades in the making but finished two years early and on budget.
The grand opening will present a world premiere of San Juan Hill: A New York Story, which the centre commissioned from composer Etienne Charles.
San Juan Hill was the predominantly Puerto Rican and black neighbourhood that was declared a “slum” and razed in the 1950s, partly to build Lincoln Centre there.
The hall’s travertine and glass facade remain. Nearly everything else in the building, whose renovation was led by Diamond Schmitt Architects – with public spaces designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects – is new.
The changes will register the second you enter from the plaza. The lobby has doubled in size and will now be dominated by a 15m-wide screen that will live-stream concerts free.
There will be a cafe; an Afro-Caribbean restaurant from James Beard Award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi; and a glassed-off ticket area that will double as a general welcome area for the centre.
The changes upstairs are even more dramatic. The soaring Grand Promenade is slightly less airy than the space in which concertgoers have long lined up to patiently await champagne during intermissions.
Two promontories that jut out from the east and west corners of the first tier are equipped with bars.
The uppermost floor has been expanded overhead to make room for New York Philharmonic staff offices that were displaced by the ground-floor renovation. While the result is less cavernous – and perhaps less grand – it promises to be more functional.
All this is a precursor to the concert hall itself, whose acoustics were designed by the firm Akustiks, led by Mr Paul Scarbrough.
Long considered one of the world’s most unpleasant halls for both audiences and musicians, this concert space is unrecognisable.
Not only is the space smaller – capacity has been reduced from 2,738 seats to 2,200 – it is more dynamic. The stage has been moved forward into the auditorium by about 7m, allowing for a small cluster of seats (often known as a “vineyard” configuration) behind the musicians.
More impressive, the walls are now covered in undulating, moulded beech that suggests sound waves.
The seats, which in photographs threaten to evoke the sense of a Greyhound bus interior, are lovely when experienced in person. Their pattern is reminiscent of falling petals and the material may remind you of raw silk.
Everything in the building, from door handles to floorboards to railings, feels reassuringly solid. Unlike other recent concert hall work in New York, the project’s US$550 million (S$788 million) price tag does not seem a mystery after a tour.
The real test will come on Saturday, when an audience takes its seats to watch the New York Philharmonic strike up its first public chords in its new, old home. BLOOMBERG
