When the New York Philharmonic English horn player and oboist Ryan Roberts performs at the renovated David Geffen Hall these days, he feels naked and exposed, as if he were appearing on a high-definition television screen.
“The sound is honest,” he said. “You hear everything — for better or for worse.”
The star violinist Hilary Hahn, a frequent soloist, has a sense of comfort. “You can trust your sound will project,” she said.
And John Adams, the composer and conductor, said that gone were the days of a concert hall that felt like Yankee Stadium. “It’s such a breath of fresh air,” he said. “You can go for much greater delicacy and subtlety.”
Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened two years ago after a $550 million renovation. By gutting and rebuilding the interior, the project was meant to break, once and for all, the acoustical curse that had plagued the hall for decades. Unveiling the new space, the Philharmonic’s leaders declared a new era, clinking champagne glasses and hailing “our 2,200-seat crown jewel.”
So, after two years and more than 270 concerts, how does the hall sound?
While the acoustics are still evolving, the reviews of Geffen Hall have largely been positive. The hall is more resonant and enveloping, according to more than a dozen Philharmonic players, guest artists, conductors and audience members. But there are still shortcomings. The hall, some say, can be cool and clinical — and at the highest volumes, blaring.
“It’s definitely better than it was,” said Rebecca Young, the Philharmonic’s associate principal viola, who joined in 1986. “But I don’t think it’s perfect.”
Since Geffen Hall reopened, technicians have made several adjustments, tinkering with the placement of acoustical panels. The orchestra’s players are still learning to play in the space: The brass players have tempered their sound, and the strings are working on blend.
Even more changes could come in 2026, when the conductor Gustavo Dudamel takes over as the Philharmonic’s music and artistic director. He could adjust the seating arrangement of the orchestra and fine-tune the balance of each section; or he may ask for changes in the angling of acoustic panels spread throughout the space.
“It’s as if you were driving an old jalopy and somebody gave you a really high-performance sports car,” said Deborah Borda, a veteran Philharmonic leader who recently returned on an interim basis. “You have to learn how to drive very differently. Our musicians have had to learn to play an entirely new instrument.”
Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director from 2018 until this past summer, said the ensemble had already achieved a good balance in its new auditorium. But, he added: “For a lot of musicians, the old hall is still in their DNA. Give them some time and you will get what you are looking for.”
For decades, the Philharmonic has faced questions about the acoustics of its home. When the orchestra opened Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center in 1962, it was a glittering affair: The audience included Jackie Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and Adlai Stevenson. But the hall’s faults were immediately apparent, a critical problem for an art form that relies on unamplified instruments.
The Philharmonic’s players had trouble hearing one another onstage, and audience members strained to hear the voices of the orchestra. The hall, a drab shoe-box auditorium, was cavernous and impersonal, with nearly a third of the audience more than 100 feet from the stage.
“Tear the place down and start over again” was the blunt advice of the conductor George Szell, who led concerts there with the Cleveland Orchestra.
After many ill-fated attempts to fix the problems over the years, including a gut renovation in 1976, plans for a radical reimagining of the hall finally took shape before the pandemic. The renovation was kick-started by a $100 million gift from Geffen, a Brooklyn-born entertainment mogul. The leaders of Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic worked together to accelerate construction during the pandemic, finishing a year and a half ahead of schedule.
To make the hall more intimate, 500 seats were eliminated, along with the proscenium. The stage was pulled 25 feet forward, with seats wrapping around it. Beechwood panels were installed along the walls, each with embellishments to help reduce the edge of higher frequencies. Seats upholstered in a floating-flower-petal motif filled the auditorium.
After the latest renovation, though, new questions about the hall’s acoustics surfaced. Critics said that while the sound was consistent and lucid, it could also be stiff and disjointed.
“The music remains stuck in front of you instead of rushing around you,” the New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote after the opening concerts in 2022. “I had the sense that I was listening to a world-class stereo system in a dry room.”
Critics’ concerns have persisted. Zachary Woolfe, writing in The New York Times in January, said that a performance of a Wagner prelude “emphasized the unpleasant way that, in densely massed music, the stark lucidity of Geffen Hall’s acoustics can tip into brittle blare rather than warm blend.”
While the hall has drawn inevitable, unfavorable comparisons with Carnegie Hall, its storied neighbor known for luxurious acoustics, some say the contrast is unfair.
“What we did is absolutely the most we could get out of the existing hall,” van Zweden said. “You cannot expect a completely new hall. It’s an impossible dream.”
The conductor Stéphane Denève said he noticed some difficulties when he took the podium just a few weeks after Geffen Hall reopened. It was hard, he said, to conjure the supple colors he needed for a program of Ravel and Roussel.
“All of the great qualities of the New York Philharmonic — this very powerful orchestra — were being challenged by the liveliness of the acoustics,” he said.
But when Denève returned to New York last year to lead Beethoven, Saint-Saëns and a premiere by Carlos Simon, he noticed a difference.
“The orchestra really found a way to be warm and immersive and powerful without being too harsh or too loud,” he said. “It was a spectacular change.”
Since the hall reopened, much of the focus has been on its sparkling visual design. The public spaces, including the lobby, have been refurbished, and the auditorium, with fewer seats, looks and feels more intimate.
The pianist Emanuel Ax said “everything felt distant” in the old hall. Some of the positive reaction to the renovation, he added, might be attributable not just to the sound but also to the “psychological relief” of feeling closer to the music.
“You feel part of the action, wherever you are,” he said. “The visual aspect has a lot to do with changing everyone’s perception.”
Composers, hearing their works in the new space, say that Geffen Hall has been an effective vessel for their music.
“The hall used to be dry and distant, and everything was smooshed,” said the composer Tania León, a member of the Philharmonic’s board. “Now it’s much more immediate.”
In the months after the reopening, technicians made adjustments to help the orchestra’s players hear one another better onstage, including adjusting the panels that run up and down the sides of the stage, which can be tilted to direct more sound energy across the orchestra.
Last year, the technicians stopped tweaking, for fear that the orchestra would be constantly “chasing the acoustics,” said Paul Scarbrough, of the firm Akustiks, who helped oversee the renovation.
Scarbrough, a renowned acoustician (he just finished a renovation of the San Diego Symphony’s Jacobs Music Center), said he did not anticipate further changes until Dudamel was more of a presence on the podium in New York. Acoustics are both an art and science, and it is hard to please everyone, Scarbrough said.
“The balances that we end up striking in conjunction with the conductor and the ensemble are not necessarily the balances that everybody will adhere to or like,” he said. “I have to temper any urge to become defensive and take criticisms on board.”
The improvements at Geffen Hall have been a bright spot in a difficult stretch for the Philharmonic. The orchestra has been distracted in recent months by labor talks, a misconduct inquiry and management churn. Still waiting on Dudamel, the ensemble has no full-time music director this season or next.
The renovation has also helped drive ticket sales during a financially precarious time, as the Philharmonic works to recover from the disruption of the pandemic.
Leelanee Sterrett, a horn player, said that in the old hall, “You had to work so hard to get your sound out into the audience — so much was lost in translation.” She said she felt the orchestra was entering a new era, with the renovated hall and Dudamel’s appointment.
“We’re still settling in, getting comfortable and making the space our own,” she said. “But we’re very hopeful.”
The players say they are finally able to appreciate the rich sound of their colleagues, after years of not being able to hear them properly onstage.
Yoobin Son, a flute player, said the musicians were now less dependent on conductors, and that they felt more connected to the emotions of the audience.
“The old hall was like mumbling — now everything is crystal clear,” she said. “The sound just flows now. We can be natural.”
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