20. a New Direction of Concert Hall Design

20. A New Direction of Concert Hall Design

Two recent projects show a new direction for concert hall layouts, and a new possibility for shared experiences: Calderwood Hall at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and Pierre Boulez Saal at Barenboim–Said Academy in Berlin. In these halls, the stage is placed exactly in the center, surrounded equally on all sides by the audience. The average distance from any seat to the stage is minimized in these configurations, greatly improving the visual and acoustical intimacy. Calderwood Hall features a remarkable 80% of seats in the front row, since only the ground floor has a second row of seats. Pierre Boulez Saal accommodates a larger audience with more rows in plan, but the extremely steep rake gives the impression of many front-row seats. Such a seating configuration is better suited to medium- to small-capacity halls with smaller stages, since larger ensembles have a natural orientation that competes with the omni-directionality of the space. Without a clear directionality imposed by the architecture, the traditional performance orientation of the musicians is challenged. The best stage layout would the one chosen as if there were no audience at all. Chamber ensembles often face each other during rehearsal or recording sessions because of the improved communication between musicians, and therefore ensemble quality. Ideally, this tight communication would be transferred from rehearsal to the concert stage, even if not all musicians face all the audience. This method is used for Calderwood Hall where the square, symmetric seating layout is completely democratic with no indication of which direction is the front. The piano, however, has a clear directionality, when the lid is opened in the usual manner. In Pierre Boulez Saal, it would be inappropriate to play piano with a lid. To counteract the psychoacoustical effect for the pianist of removing the lid, I suggested to Daniel Barenboim to think of the ceiling above the stage as the lid: it does the work of projecting the sound out to the audience. Barenboim has embraced this change and recommends this condition to visiting pianists as well. Should the lid be kept, an alternative is to rotate the piano during intermission, so as not to favor a single direction and to present viewer- listeners with different experiences within the same concert. Occasionally, larger ensembles with conductor performing in Pierre Boulez Saal also change orientation during intermission. For solo vocal performances in a non-directional space, the challenge is even more pronounced than in a larger surround- style hall. In the opening concert series of Calderwood Hall, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa opted to rotate slowly during her performance. This response illustrates how a new environment can spark interesting ideas from performers. By relinquishing a strict and imposed sense of directionality on the stage and in the hall, these “in-the-round” designs indeed encourage new approaches for performers and offer new experiences to the viewer-listeners. It is the task of architects and contributing designers to explore and expand the possibilities for other types of halls, even with larger seating capacities. More importantly, we hope they can foster new ways to present concerts by inspiring musicians, singers, composers, conductors, stage directors, dancers, visual and multimedia artists, venue managers, concertgoers, and even those who might not normally find themselves in a concert hall.