David Geffen Hall Round-up

David Geffen Hall

View of the stage and some of the seating

Photo by Chris Lee, courtesy of the N.Y. Philharmonic

The day has arrived or is arriving: the gut-renovated David Geffen Hall, reduced by about 500 seats and now more of a grapevine theater, the staged moved way out from the rear wall, is re-opening. Everyone has been complaining about the acoustics of the theater since it opened nearly 60 years ago, and everyone is hopeful that the new theater will sound good to the audience* and that musicians on the stage, crucially, will be able to hear each other - particularly the musicians of the NY Philharmonic, who've suffered for all that time. Their first concert is on Wednesday, October 12, in two days.

• Highlights from the re-opening of Geffen Hall, various NY Times reporters. Note that the musicians quoted sound happy!
• Michael Kimmelman, A Notoriously Jinxed Concert Hall is Reborn, Again, NY Times. A superb survey of the hall's history.
• Javier C. Hernandez, A Pioneering Orchestral Boss Had `Unfinished Business`, So She Returned. Look, if anyone is entitled to use "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" as their ringtone, it's Deborah Borda.
• Rivka Galchen, The Science and Emotions of Lincoln Center’s New Sound, The New Yorker
• Justin Davidson, The New David Geffen Hall is Here. How Does It Sound?, New York Magazine 
• Zachary Woolfe, NY Times, How the Philharmonic’s New Home Sounds, From Any Seat
• Zachary Woolfe, NY Times, After Decades, the Philharmonic’s Hall Sounds and Feels More Intimate
• Zachary Woolfe, NY Times, Critic's Notebook: The Philharmonic Tests Its New Home With the Classics
• Josephine Sedgwick, The Philharmonic's Home Gets a Tune-Up
• Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post
• Alex Ross, The New Yorker

Watch for updates to this post; I imagine that others will weigh in on the new hall.

UPDATED: November 10, 2022. Seven articles from the Times! Well, it's good publicity.

* I was most recently there in 2017 for a concert performance of Das Rheingold. Sitting in a seat that would have had great sound in most theaters...I could barely hear the six harps on the stage. The orchestra sounded fabulous when I heard them at Carnegie Hall in 2010.