Culture | The Elbphilharmonie

A new concert hall is worth the wait, and the cost

Seven years late and built at ten times its proposed cost, it is also a stunning achievement that will make the Hanseatic city a must-see cultural destination

Making waves
|HAMBURG

ON OCTOBER 31st, the lights on the new concert hall in Hamburg spelled out fertig—“finished”, and the city heaved a sigh of relief. The history of the crazily ambitious project known as the Elbphilharmonie had been chequered. Conceived in 2003 at a projected cost of €77m ($82.3m), it ended up costing ten times that and was completed seven years late. It survived disputes, lawsuits and a parliamentary inquiry. No wonder its architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron—creators of Tate Modern and, along with Ai Weiwei and others, of the “bird’s nest” Olympic Stadium in Beijing—feared at one point that the job would destroy their Basel-based firm. In 2011 Barbara Kisseler, Hamburg’s outspoken culture senator, neatly summed up her fellow-citizens’ ambivalence: “The Elbphilharmonie is very dear to us, in both senses of the word.”

The tallest building in town, its roof covered in giant sequins, it sits on the end of a busy wharf and has been likened to a crystal on a rock, a bubble-wrapped ice-cube and a ship under sail. The hull has been constructed from a converted cocoa warehouse. The sails are a technical marvel: 1,000 plate-glass panels, heated to 600°C to curve, bulge or pucker, each imprinted with a seemingly random pattern of metal dots that change colour in response to the shifting light. This is kinetic art on a gargantuan scale.

The hall had to fit into a very small footprint, so the architects had to think vertically. Their acoustics expert was the celebrated and demanding Yasuhisa Toyota. His 30-year-old Suntory Hall in Tokyo is still a benchmark for acoustic refinement and visual elegance. His customary terraced “vineyard” seating design—pioneered at the Berlin Philharmonie in the 1960s—is now widely adopted. The traditional “shoebox” design has good seats and bad seats, but the more democratic “vineyard” has no “best” seats. At the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg no one is more than 30 metres from the stage.

Achieving the sound that Mr Toyota wanted meant hanging the hall like a cocoon from the roof and surrounding it with feather pillows to isolate the building from external industrial noise. The interior is clad with 10,000 distressed gypsum panels, each individually computer-designed both to diffuse the sound and to keep it rich. Hollowed-out like a cave, and conceived in curves and swirls with not a straight line in sight, the space feels as if it has been crafted entirely by hand.

The inaugural concert on January 11th, programmed to show off the acoustic flexibility, was a triumph. Whether for a small period-instrument ensemble or a massive Wagner orchestra, for Sir Bryn Terfel’s clarion baritone or Philippe Jaroussky’s ethereal falsetto, the sound was balanced and warm with absolute clarity of detail. The bare oak foyers, with their vast flights of stairs, are spartan, reflecting the tastes of a city that is elegant yet restrained.

The main hall is only part of the project. There is also a smaller chamber hall and a substantial education department. The resident NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester is there, as is Resonanz, a radical experimental string ensemble. What impresses most is the programme being devised by Christoph Lieben-Seutter, the Elbphilharmonie’s general director. This features not just glittering names, though there are plenty of those, but also breadth and variety, and a determined drive to bring in new audiences. “Salaam Syria” in mid-March will be a three-day festival devoted to the music of the world’s most strife-torn country, with performances from the players of the Syrian Expat Orchestra. Since Hamburg is home to many migrants, this is more than a gesture. It is telling that every concert in the opening season sold out within hours of tickets going on sale.

Concert halls are increasingly a political matter. Angela Merkel and five other members of the federal government attended the birth of the already-beloved “Elphie”. Four months ago the depressed Ruhr-valley city of Bochum opened a charming new concert hall which had been in part crowdfunded by 20,000 local residents. Two years ago the superb Philharmonie de Paris opened its doors to near-universal acclaim, after a three-decade campaign for its creation led by Pierre Boulez and other French musicians. In Paris the mainspring was left-wing politics: the Philharmonie makes a point of drawing audiences from poor areas, and it encourages children to learn to play instruments from other cultures. Yet another hall, the mostly publicly funded Seine Musicale, is due to open in Paris soon.

London may be the outlier here. A proposed new hall for the Barbican Centre, which would probably cost £400m ($493m), has its cheerleaders in the press. But the project, promoted with implausible bombast about “outreach” but increasingly seen as a metropolitan vanity, has few friends even in the music profession, let alone outside it. It would of course be nice for London to have its own state-of-the-art concert hall, but with the already-existing Southbank and Barbican halls, imperfect though they may be, musical life is perfectly liveable without one. Hamburg, however, is a different story. One of the richest cities in Europe, it has never been seen as a top-tier cultural destination. The Elbphilharmonie may change that.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Worth the wait, and the cost"

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