The first purpose-built public concert hall in Europe, Oxford’s Holywell Music Room, is a compact, elegant space which seats just 200 people and hosts intimate concerts and student recitals. Prior to its first opening, in 1748, classical music had been performed in churches, royal courts and artistocratic houses. But the emerging middle classes needed something more: they were making music at home but wanted to hear it in public spaces, to meet like-minded people and to put their cultural tastes on show. Societies of music lovers sprang up in major cities with the purpose of setting up orchestras and building concert halls. In 1813, the newly formed Royal Philharmonic Society of London commissioned the architect John Nash to renovate the Argyll Rooms opposite what is now the Apple Store on Regent Street, London, and created a concert hall. Similar societies in Leipzig, Vienna and Liverpool were responsible for the building of new halls for music. As the industrial revolution progressed, the concert halls got bigger, with venues such as Birmingham’s Greek temple-style town hall of 1834 and steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie’s famous 1891 concert hall in New York, becoming symbols of civic pride and industrial new money.
More recently, concert halls have been conceived with broader social purposes in mind. The Royal Festival Hall was built as part of the Festival of Britain to raise spirits after the war; Birmingham’s 1991 Symphony Hall was seen as crucial to the regeneration of an economically depressed city and Sage Gateshead opened in 2004, providing a world-class concert hall and a focal point for community music and education in the north-east of England. The latest concert hall project with far-reaching social ambitions is the Philharmonie de Paris, which will open next month on the eastern edge of the French capital.
The Philharmonie is a huge, organic structure rising up in the Parc de la Villette, the arts and science park built just inside the boulevard périphérique on the site of the old Paris meat market and abattoirs. It is the latest and, sadly, possibly the last major manifestation of the energy and willpower of Pierre Boulez, composer, conductor and the godfather of music in France. For more than half a century, Boulez has used his influence to get concert halls built, ensembles founded and music research centres established. At 89, he is now in poor health, but his spirit is everywhere throughout this project. The neighbouring Cité de la Musique (which will come under the management of the Philharmonie and will be renamed Philharmonie 2) opened in 1995 and realised Boulez’s dream for a flexible concert hall fit for the 21st century: wired for electronic sound, capable of changing shape and layout to accommodate contemporary works such as his own spatial masterpiece, Repons, and incorporating a museum and education spaces. But, with 900 seats, the Cité was too small for big symphony orchestras, and Boulez was soon planning a bigger version.
Its construction has sparked controversy – over the location and, especially, the escalating costs to the city of Paris and the French government. Priced at an estimated €381m (£303m), it will rank among the most expensive concert halls in the world. And even before its opening, the Philharmonie’s artistic lineup is attracting complaints both of elitism and of dumbing down.
But the venue is a glamorous architectural statement, designed by French star architect Jean Nouvel, whose credits include the Musée du Quai Branly and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris as well as concert halls in Lucerne and Copenhagen. From a distance, it looks like a great, geological mound, as if some seismic event had created a mountain. Move nearer and you can see its external walls, billowing like folds of cloth. From yet another angle, the building looks like a huge bird that has landed on the park - and Nouvel continues the avian theme by cladding many of the outside surfaces, underfoot and on walls, with 200,000 tiles in the shape of flying birds in what must be 50 shades of grey aluminium.
But most classical music lovers will tell you that it’s the inside of a concert hall that counts: the great halls are the ones with great acoustics. It’s all highly subjective, but the top three acoustics are generally agreed to be the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Symphony Hall in Boston. All three were built during the second half of the 19th century, the first building boom for purpose built concert halls when cities saw them as a source of civic pride. In those days, acoustics was still one of the dark arts rather than a precise science, but these halls have in common the shoebox shape, a long rectangle in which the performers are positioned at one end and where straight, high walls reflect and blend the sound.
By the mid 20th century, architects believed that the formal, hierarchical layouts of these concert halls were outdated, reflecting the social order of their times. In the ruins of postwar Berlin, Hans Scharoun built the Berlin Philharmonie (opened in 1963) to reflect a more democratic ideal, a “new society” in Scharoun’s words: the performers are in the centre and the audience encircle them in sloping terraces, an arrangement that came to be known as the vineyard model. Scharoun employed the latest acoustic science to ensure that the Berlin hall sounds as glorious as it looks, and its vineyard design became the inspiration for many new halls around the world: from Disney Hall in LA to Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the long delayed and still unopened Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
Simon Rattle insisted on the 19th-century shoebox shape for Symphony Hall in Birmingham, built in 1990 when he was in charge of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The Philharmonie de Paris has the best of both worlds. The basic design is vineyard, but some very sexy technology means that banks of seating can disappear into walls to create a shoebox, or a standing venue for rock and pop concerts. As with the Philharmonie in Berlin, the acoustic is enhanced by floating “clouds”, wooden acoustic reflectors that control the sound in the space. And there is an ingenious solution to one of the key tensions in concert hall design: the need for a large volume of space for the sound to resonate, while allowing the audience to be close to the action. The Philharmonie’s banks of seating are nested inside the much larger shell of the hall, floating free of its walls, making for an intimate experience in a large space: “no audience member will be more than 32 metres away from the performers,” says chief executive Laurent Bayle, “but the room is large enough to be very resonant.”
But the new building must fulfil a social as well as a musical function, and when visiting I am reminded that the périphérique is more than a traffic artery. It is a social barrier: on one side, the Haussmann boulevards and creamy beige limestone of the ancient centre of Paris, home to cultural institutions and wealthy urbanites; on the other, the banlieues, the edgier, poorer, multicultural suburbs French politicians are trying to bridge this divide with a vision of “Grand Paris”, an integrated city with more equality of opportunity. The new tramline that weaves its way in and out of the suburbs and has a stop outside the new concert hall is symbolic of this ambition, and so, too, is the Philharmonie de Paris.
The views from the roof terrace, 37 metres above street level – whether of the Sacré Coeur and central Paris to the west, or of the suburbs and the hills to the east – offer a reminder of Bayle’s desire to embrace new horizons. “This is a new vision for a concert hall – and one of the most important things about it is the location. Classical music has been concentrated in the west of the city, which is wealthy; the Salle Pleyel, Radio France [which has itself just opened a new concert hall], the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. From this place, we can reach out to a whole new audience – we can unite the suburbs and the city centre – it’s Grand Paris,” he says. The East wall of the building quite literally does reach out to the suburbs: a giant, digital screen will project images and words across the Peripherique towards the banlieu of Pantin.
In the brochure for the opening season, Bayle opposes the idea that classical music should be linked to social class. He wants to “break down the barriers, shake up the ritual of the concert, prioritise education programmes for young people and make links between musical genres”. To do all this, he will have at his disposal a 2,200-seat concert hall, rehearsal rooms with public galleries, extensive workshop spaces which can take school groups and staff who can look after children while parents attend a concert. There will also be a gallery space, whose first exhibition will be the V&A’s David Bowie show, as well as cafes and restaurants.
But what of the music? It will be a more diverse mix than is usual in French musical institutions. Classical will dominate, with the Orchestre de Paris and Ensemble InterContemporain in residence, and it will provide a Paris venue for visiting European orchestras such as the LSO, the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as the New York Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela or the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. But weekends will also be themed on topics such as New York, Bowie, science fiction, the human voice, amateur music and love stories, exploring ideas across all genres of music in concerts, workshops and talks.
If all this seems familiar to British audiences already au fait with eclectic programming of Southbank Centre, the Barbican, Sage Gateshead, Birmingham or Glasgow Concert Halls, it represents a radical step in France, where classical culture has enjoyed far higher state support and its importance has gone largely unchallenged. Last month, a study from the University of Limoges found that the average age of classical concertgoers in France has risen from 36 in 1981 to 61 today: Bayle’s desire to shake things up is timely.
Glamorous design, great acoustics and a classy programme guarantee that the Philharmonie de Paris will be a major new landmark in Paris and a great asset to the international community of musicians and music lovers who will enjoy its gleaming new spaces. But its ambitions are greater than that. It is aiming for nothing less than social transformation through the arts.
Gillian Moore is head of classical music at London’s Southbank Centre. See philharmoniedeparis.fr for details of the Philharmonie’s opening season.
