The discussion about the acoustics of concert halls has become somewhat delusional.
It is as if wine connoisseurs talk more extensively about the cut of their crystal goblets than about their contents.
The new makeshift building for Munich's Gasteig, which is currently under renovation, sounds, without further ado, completely acceptable.
There you can listen to orchestral music with concentration, joy and profit.
The selectivity of the individual lines is significantly better than in the old Gasteig.
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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When Valery Gergiev conducted the Munich Philharmonic at the opening, it was wonderful to follow the thematic dialogue of the bassoons with flutes and oboes in the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's fourth piano concerto, with Daniil Trifonov taking care of himself at the piano. The episode in B flat major in the finale, when the two-part violas with the cellos sound almost like an old English viol consort, had something sensitive, intimate and vulnerable to it, which is also Beethoven's music here. And even in the murmur of the waves of daybreak at the beginning of the second suite from "Daphnis et Chloé" by Maurice Ravel, one could enjoy the color change between clarinets and flutes as well as between shadow and light,without the overall impression of a monumental panorama being torn apart by intrusive details. The hall gives the music what it demands. So it is functionally successful.
Sound sails could help
The fact that the mercury-like vortices of high woodwinds and drums in “Araising Dances” by Thierry Escaich or the “Métaboles” by Henri Dutilleux can perhaps - as elsewhere - be corrected and focused better with sound sails.
The Munich Philharmonic Choir sounded flawless in the excerpt from Rodion Shchedrin's “Sealed Angel”: neither washed out nor splintered, always clear and with inner luminosity.
The fact that strings often appear hollow and disembodied in the middle register will change with playful practice in the hall.
There are musically worse things in this world.
The architects Gerkan, Marg und Partner and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota have created a good basis for the Munich orchestras - the Philharmonic as well as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and certainly also the Munich Chamber Orchestra and perhaps the radio orchestra - will work here for the next few years can.
The refurbishment of the Gasteig will not be completed before the end of this decade;
The construction of a new concert hall at the Ostbahnhof will certainly be discussed again soon.
Traffic jams in the aisles and at the doors
What doesn't work on this interim in the Sendling district, directly on the Isar, is the social part of the assembly building. The concert hall has too few doors. If you sit in the middle of the parquet, when the room is fully occupied - as a reasonably polite person - you need a quarter of an hour to be able to leave the room. The traffic jam in the aisles and at the doors is too big; the waiting times at the toilets during the breaks are considerable. The old transformer hall from 1929, which, as an upstream, listed building, serves as a foyer for the concert hall, is too small for 1,800 guests at once. You cannot move freely there during the break.
The concert hall itself, with its interior made of black-stained, unpainted spruce wood and a bright stage, looks almost exactly like the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki. The entire wooden structure was hung in the sheet metal container that surrounds the hall by means of a considerable engineering effort. The container itself looks like the scaled-down logistics center of a mail order company on the A4 in Bad Hersfeld or like a monumental execution box with an upscale interior. Can you really not expect more for a construction cost of 43 million euros? The strategy of avoiding luxury is justified in the foyer, the transformer hall, by the monument protection, which has called for the industrial building to be left largely untouched. Therefore, the floor markings of the warehouse as well as the sheet metal parapets of the mezzanine floors were preserved.All piping systems stretch out to face the view without disguise.
This
industrial chic
can now be found in many urban high-culture buildings around the world that are no longer makeshift.
The foyer and cloakroom area of the new Copenhagen Philharmonic designed by Jean Nouvel also looks like the storage room of a moving company.
Hegemony through false modesty
Such architectural statements are a sign that the bourgeoisie is socially colonizing the museum areas of the industrial proletariat without really sharing its cultural and economic interests. One wants to secure one's hegemony through an exhibited, hence false, modesty, which is supposed to secure the truce. In terms of budget and appearance, the “Isarphilharmonie” - also called “Gasteig HP 8” after the address in Hans-Preißinger-Straße - is an expression of a new high culture shame.
When Munich's Mayor Dieter Reiter described the building as a “blueprint for cultural buildings of the future” in his opening speech, it sounded like a threat packaged as praise.
As an interim building, the Isarphilharmonie has been carefully made; as a permanent solution, it would be a surrender and a symptom that classical music is already looking for cover in the trenches of inconspicuousness as a precaution in the upcoming wars of distribution.
Daniil Trifonov, glowing with intimacy, played the piano as an encore by Myra Hess' arrangement of the chorale “Jesus remains my joy” from the cantata BWV 147 by Johann Sebastian Bach.
He did something monstrous with it: in the middle of a building that outwardly defines music only as a trade and business, he prayed quietly but fearlessly.