A Bright New Version

Even before its opening in 1962, the management of Lincoln Center was calling it "the finest musical instrument in America." Philharmonic Hall was indeed something to behold--especially the gold mohair seats and the 136 acoustical clouds designed by Leo L. Beranek to hang from the ceiling and reflect the sound. Alas, the $17.7 million hall was something else to hear--strident, cold, weak in bass. In succeeding years, a series of four acoustical repair jobs (total cost: $2.5 million) were made, culminating in the replacement of the entire ceiling in 1969. But to little avail. In 1973, Hi-Fi Magnate Avery Fisher donated $10 million to keep the place going. Accordingly, Lincoln Center put his name on it, which was just as well. His money was used for the most radical step of all. Starting last May, the hall was gutted and a new interior built.

Last week Avery Fisher Hall was reopened after a $6.4 million, five-month crash reconstruction job. Said Fisher: "I hope they like it, because I haven't enough money to build another." No worry. The sound of success could be heard both inside and outside the hall. The man responsible was Master Acoustician Cyril M. Harris, 59, who could already boast of the fine sound at the Metropolitan Opera, Washington's (B.C.) Kennedy Center and, most spectacular of all, the two-year-old Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Conductor Pierre Boulez was pleased because the 110 men and women of the New York Philharmonic no longer had to force their sound and now could hear each other clearly.

As for the audience, it enjoyed a Brahms and Stravinsky program and a sound of startling clarity and brightness that seemed to leap off the stage. The music did not have the warm mellowness of venerable Carnegie Hall, nor did it seem to have enough bass on the left side of the main floor. But other conductors and orchestras will provide the ultimate test of those qualities: the cerebral Boulez is not a man for lush sonorities, and the Philharmonic still sounds brasher than most, undoubtedly because of their struggle in the old hall.

The result is a happy ending to one of the great modern scandals in the performing arts. The turning point had come two years earlier, when both the Boston Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra decided to leave and play their New York concerts in Carnegie. "You can imagine how I felt about that," said Fisher, one of the pioneer manufacturers of sound equipment. The entire inside of the Fisher Hall was gutted. Harris put in 2,742 new seats, with fabric (velvet) and wood (oak) carefully designed to be minimally sound absorbent. All the old seats had been removed; some were given to a fledgling theater group only a few blocks away. The Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ, part of the rear wall, was sold for $100,000 (original cost: $175,000) to a California church. Virtually everything else was reduced to 9,326 yds. of rubble and shipped off to landfill areas in New York and New Jersey.

Sound Traps. Harris, who is a professor of architecture and electrical engineering at Columbia University, found that the problems with the old hall were not just the clouds and sound-absorbing upholstery, which had disappeared anyway in earlier renovations. The concave walls, designed to improve sight lines, turned out to be traps, forming eddies of sound. Worst of all, the stage and main floor were laid directly on concrete and incapable of resonating properly.

The new design by Harris and Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee testifies to the perhaps inadvertent wisdom of earlier eras. Everything about the two 19th century concert halls that Harris reveres--Vienna's Grosser Musikvereinsaal and Boston's Symphony Hall--has an optimum effect on the sound produced. Like them, the new Fisher Hall is a rectangle (120 ft. from the rear wall to the stage apron, 69 ft. 8 in. between the narrow side balconies). Similarly, the main floor and stage are constructed of wood (darkly stained oak) over an air space, so that they will act as sounding boards. The hall is snugger than before (650,000 cu. ft., v. 850,000), and since any pianissimo needs silence, each air-conditioning duct is lined, and the tightly sealed doors weigh 370 Ibs. each. Every piece of plaster and wood is the solidest money can buy.

"There isn't a thing in that building that Cy Harris didn't kick at least once," says Johnson. "If he wanted it heavier, he got it. He was the boss, and my approach from the start was that if anyone was going to be exiled to Argentina in the morning, it was going to be him, not me." Harris is not going anyplace, except in triumph to Salt Lake City and Bombay to work on new concert halls.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.