With new David Geffen Hall, the NYPhil returns on an optimistic note
NEW YORK — “There she is,” I hear someone say as we round the corner. I’m backstage at the newly renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, taking a hard-hat tour through its noisy, labyrinthine corridors with New York Philharmonic CEO Deborah Borda. But she’s not the “she” in question.
Rather, “she” is a broad-shouldered, custom-crafted digital organ, slowly getting dollied out of a freight elevator and making the last leg of its journey from a manufacturer in Pennsylvania to its new home in the hall, where its precision sampled tones will sound through an array of 78 speakers.
Normally my metaphors aren’t obvious enough to block an entire hallway, but this massive instrument, an eye-catching hybrid of the old and the new, makes a fitting symbol for the overhaul of this historically acoustically plagued venue. At David Geffen Hall, a traditional function has taken on a futurist form to achieve a practical goal: better sound for all.
The organ, crafted from the same rich hardwood as the stage, is but one of several thousand hand-selected details of the new venue, of which every bit of visible material is new. The $550 million hall is the prize at the end of a years-long process, undertaken to address a decades-long grievance: The old one sounded like hot garbage. (So I hear! Just reporting the news!)
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According to Borda, talk of renovations to remedy the hall’s chronic sonic problems started in the 1990s, when the orchestra still had the shakes from its last traumatic demolition job in the mid-1970s (and Philharmonic Hall made its grand lateral transformation into Avery Fisher Hall). Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, along with acoustician Cyril M. Harris, had lent the hall a leaner look with cleaner lines but zero soul.
Cycles of subsequent plans materialized and fizzled, and frustrations mounted within the ranks; at one point in the early aughts, the New York Philharmonic was ready to jump ship from Lincoln Center and run into the arms of Carnegie Hall. That didn’t happen.
In 2015, a surprise $100 million gift from music and entertainment magnate David Geffen secured his name on the side of the building into perpetuity. It also secured the Philharmonic a fighting chance at fixing an existential problem.
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“These projects are generally 20-year journeys,” Borda says. “Job number one was the acoustics, but it was really time to redesign the hall, better optimize the space and make it an inviting and beautiful place for all New Yorkers. It’s really all to make a home for music for the 21st century.”
For the New York Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the country (founded in 1842), thinking in terms of centuries comes naturally. The orchestra was hard hit by the pandemic, losing $27 million in ticket sales over the period, and laying off 40 percent of its administrative staff, according to Borda. But the shuttering of the performing arts world also had a fortuitous effect on the renovation of the concert hall, allowing the Phil to finish construction ahead of schedule. (It was scheduled to open in 2023.)
The break also coincided with other big, institutional changes. Music director Jaap van Zweden announced in September 2021 that he would step down at the end of the 2023-2024 season. The Dutch conductor started in 2018 and pointed to a reconsideration of his priorities to explain his departure. (It is “out of freedom,” he told the New York Times.) In 2024, he will embark on a five-year contract as music director for the Seoul Philharmonic.
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As for the search for his successor, Borda smiles, pleads the Fifth, and seems to greatly enjoy doing so.
Borda herself announced her departure in June, as well as her successor, National Symphony Orchestra Executive Director Gary Ginstling, who will start as executive director Nov. 1, working with Borda until he takes the top job in June 2023.
The next several days mark the first steps in what is arguably a new path for the orchestra. (Just please be careful, there’s still stuff all over the floor.)
An invitation-only concert for donors and friends Oct. 6 will be followed by a “hard-hat concert” for the construction crews and orchestra staff Oct. 7. But the hall doesn’t officially open to the public until Oct. 8, when composer and jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles premieres a work commissioned by Lincoln Center.
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“San Juan Hill: A New York Story” is an “immersive multimedia” tribute to the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood razed to make way for Lincoln Center’s opening in 1956. Artist Nina Chanel Abney’s vibrant companion mural, “San Juan Heal,” brightens the hall’s West 65th Street facade.
And on Oct. 12, “NY Phil Returns Home” gives the hall a proper debut. Van Zweden will lead the orchestra in the world premiere of Marcos Balter’s “Oyá” (for light, electronics and orchestra), a reprise of composer Tania Leon’s Pulitzer-winning “Stride” (a product of the NYPhil’s “Project 19” initiative for women composers), and works by John Adams (“My Father Knew Charles Ives”) and Ottorino Respighi (“Pines of Rome”).
In the past, the design of the hall was dictated by straight lines and orderly rows; a scheme — immediately disrupted by the continuous requisite supplementation of various baffles, panels and other acoustic treatments — attempted to improve the sound.
The new hall seems to anticipate these concerns with each contour of every wall — an undulating wood surface that again fuses old and new, form and function: The randomized undulations of the wood walls shape the sound while their classically informed vertical lines guide your eyes. The tiers themselves feel wrapped around you like shawls of oak, beech and walnut. A ring of blue light illuminates the perimeter of the uppermost tier. (Borda calls it an homage to Frank Gehry, the architect with whom she opened L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003.)
In those upper tiers (favored by handfuls of construction workers at the rehearsal I attended), long single rows of single seats angle toward the stage. (The term “bus seats” is thrown around in the tour.) It’s a small but impactful highlight of the new hall’s emphasis on attention. A profoundly adjusted rake (i.e. slope of the floor) contributes to this. It gives the room the feel of an elongated bowl, and in concert with the curvature of the aisles — as well as a subtle system of three variations in seat widths — allows for unobstructed views from every seat.
To that end, wherever you are in the hall, the stage feels closer, because it is. The proscenium has been removed entirely and the stage brought forward 25 feet, fitted with flexible risers and parterre seating. Thus, the audience surrounds the stage. A blue and crimson pattern of rose petals diffusing over the seat backs reinforces the natural fall of one’s attention toward the music. It’s as if you’re inside the body of an instrument.
One notable addition is really more of a subtraction: the removal of just over 500 seats, bringing the capacity of the hall from 2,738 to 2,200, but greatly increasing the intimacy of the listening experience.
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This extra room also aided in modernizing the capabilities of the hall, which architect Gary McCluskie of Diamond Schmitt Architects emphasized was guided by the direction of contemporary music itself, which increasingly extends into multimedia territory. The hall answers this with multiple stage configurations, a pop-out projection booth, elaborate lighting rigs obscured by an elegant mesh ceiling, and acoustic capabilities that can transform to accommodate acoustic or amplified music.
In the lobby, architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsein have brightened up (and doubled the size of) what once was a dour downer of a space — which didn’t really offer much of it.
Public space and access have been increased and encouraged through wide entrances from Lincoln Plaza, and ground-level offices were removed to make room for a “Sidewalk Studio” for street-facing performances. Grand glassy overhangs emphasize the height of the lobby, and a glowing 50-foot media wall animates the interior. (This screen will live-stream performances from within the hall to allow visitors to drop in and listen.)
Copper trimmings, slender metallic chandeliers and rich woods throughout evoke orchestral materials, while long drapes and deep blue walls imbue humanity into a space that, on a good day, felt civic at best.
As for the sound of the orchestra in the new hall? This critic is bound by the sacred oath of embargo not to breathe a subjective word about that until such time as it officially opens. Fine.
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The musicians, meanwhile, are free to sing its praises, and do.
“It’s amazing,” says second flutist Yoobin Son, now in her 10th year with the orchestra and fresh off the stage from a rehearsal of Florence Price’s fourth symphony. She’s thrilled at how well she can hear her fellow players. “It sounds bright, alive, young,” she says.
But Son sounds equally pumped about the new music stands, the comfier chairs onstage and the luck by which she scored a spot in the new dressing rooms with natural light. It’s the little things.
When asked what she’s glad to leave behind from the old hall, she says everything.
“I mean there were good memories. It was where I had my first everything with this orchestra,” Son says. “But the hall was difficult to play in, and I knew it was bad because we’d go on tour, I’d hear us in these other halls and think, ‘Wow … we sound good!’ ”
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Son found that the muddle onstage in the old hall also forced the orchestra as a whole to rely more on the conductor. For an orchestra in transition — especially one making the swing from one music director to the next — the ability to listen to each other is paramount.
Concertmaster Frank Huang has been with the orchestra for seven years, and while the placement of some sections and tilting of certain acoustic panels are still being tweaked, he can already sense a closer musical conversation happening in the hall, onstage and off.
“You weren’t getting a good mix of the different colors and timbres of the orchestra,” Huang says. “Now you’re getting a much more realistic sound, and visually you’re also much closer. We’re able to pull the audience into our sound now, we don’t have to worry about playing out. The more intimate colors are there. It widens our palette.”
For listeners making their first visit to the hall, I can at least say without getting too subjective or getting in any trouble that the difference in sound is immediate and arresting. And that’s not just between Geffen and its past iterations, but between Geffen and most of the major concert halls I’ve experienced. Not once did I find myself leaning forward in my seat or squinting with my ears. The sound finds you.
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For the orchestra, meanwhile, the new hall is a beast that will require some firm taming and fine tuning. Consensus points to this sonic settling-in as the primary project of year one.
“It’ll take a while to get the perfect mix for us,” says Huang, his fellow players making a radiant racket behind us. “But that’s part of the fun.”
NY Phil Returns Home Oct. 12 at 7:30 p.m. at David Geffen Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. nyphil.org.
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