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The coronavirus pandemic has dealt a devastating blow to performing arts institutions across the country, shutting down their theaters and robbing them of ticket revenues. But for the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, it also offered a silver lining: the opportunity to accelerate the long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall.
With concerts in the hall having been canceled since March 2020, construction has started in earnest in recent months. Work is expected to continue for a year and a half, with a reopening scheduled for fall 2022, the orchestra and center announced on Monday.
That’s a year and a half ahead of schedule, though with that comes the trade-off that the Philharmonic will not be in Geffen for the wave of triumphant cultural returns expected to be in the country this fall, assuming the pandemic is decreasing.
The orchestra will nonetheless spend much of its next season at Lincoln Center, with the majority of its performances at Alice Tully Hall or the Rose Theater, alongside forays into Carnegie Hall and other spaces. Although she plans to announce her full program in early June, Deborah Borda, general manager of the Philharmonic Orchestra, said in a video interview with other orchestra and center conductors that she is planning concerts at more small scale and without intermission, at least at the beginning.
It has been, says Borda, “the most difficult season I have scheduled.” But, she added, “I think there’s going to be an explosion in pent-up public demand. How many more Zoom concerts can we broadcast on top of that? “
The renovation of Geffen Hall is expected to cost $ 550 million, of which $ 500 million has been raised, Henry Timms, president of Lincoln Center, said in the interview. He added that “large” individual donations had been pledged, but was not ready to announce any other denomination giveaways beyond the $ 100 million from entertainment mogul David Geffen who started the project. in 2015.
“Until 2020, and rightly so, people’s minds were elsewhere, and we had a lot of other challenges as organizations,” said Timms. “But once we got to the end of the year, the opportunity became clear: could we do this sooner? It became a period during which many people came together to support the project, because they saw it as a story of recovery, a way to invest in the economic and human revival of the city.
The old plan called for a gradual progression to limit disruption at the Philharmonic, which would never have lost a full season in the venue. Lincoln Center board chair Katherine Farley said the new schedule will not reduce the scope of the renovation, which aims to make the drab room more aesthetically and acoustically appealing. The seats will surround the stage, which will be pulled forward 25 feet to what is currently row J, bringing a greater sense of privacy to what can look like a cavernous shoebox. The new space will have around 2,200 seats, up from 2,738.
The walls will be redone to improve the resonance of the room, especially the low frequencies. The cramped halls and other public spaces will be enlarged and improved by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who in 2019 joined a team that also includes Diamond Schmitt Architects, who works inside the auditorium; Akustiks, an acoustic design company; and Fisher Dachs Associates, a theater design firm.
The Philharmonic Orchestra did not completely fall into obscurity during the pandemic. In late summer and early fall last year, he brought small groups of musicians into town in a van rented for pop-up shows, and announced he would be back on the road this spring. Its NYPhil + subscription streaming service was unveiled in February, with archive gigs and new content. On April 14 and 15, a contingent of players will appear in front of a small audience at The Shed, 30 blocks south of Lincoln Center, with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. (Jaap van Zweden, the musical director of the Philharmonic Orchestra, was unavailable due to overseas engagements, although he was recently in New York to record two programs for NYPhil +.)
But his losses were crushing. The orchestra predicted that the cancellation of its 2020-2021 season would result in a loss of $ 21 million in ticket revenue, in addition to the $ 10 million lost in the final months of its season last spring. (Part of that was mitigated by emergency fundraising.) Even when live performances pick up, despite Borda’s optimistic predictions, the box office may not immediately rebound.
The need for savings that will extend beyond the pandemic was reflected in a new four-year contract signed by the orchestra and its musicians in December, which includes a 25% cut in players’ base salary until August 2023. Compensation will then be gradual. increase until the end of the contract in September 2024, but at that point musicians will still be paid less than they were before the pandemic.
The renovation of Geffen Hall – which opened in 1962 as the Philharmonic Hall and was called Avery Fisher Hall from 1976 – has been on hold and postponed for years, reviewing plans and architects. At some point in the early 2000s, the exasperated Philharmonic planned a return to their old home, Carnegie Hall; that plan failed, which further damaged relations between the orchestra and Lincoln Center, its owner, which also uses the hall for its own musical presentations and for business rental. Concluded in 2012, a $ 1.2 billion redevelopment of the center left improvements everywhere – but the expensive lobby overhaul was not included.
Then, in 2015, Geffen relaunched the project with the donation that gave the hall its name. Construction was slated to begin in 2019, but stagnated long before that amid logistical issues and management turnover at both the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center. That plan called for finishing the venue in time for the 2021-22 season. It was a schedule that the orchestra and center came to doubt was viable, but had they been able to stick to it, the renovated hall would have been ready to open just as the city hopes to get out of the way. long pandemic shutdown.
Borda was hired in 2017 largely to get the renovation back on track; in her previous job as head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she had taken the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall beyond the finish line. In New York City, she pushed for a plan that was less flashy and more achievable than some of the options on offer – one less likely to over budget and designed to take place in stages, limiting the scopes the Philharmonic would be. exiled.
Being away from the theater for several years was supposed to pose an existential threat to the loyalty of his audience. Ironically, if Geffen reopens as scheduled, the orchestra will have been away from home for almost two and a half seasons in a row – exactly the situation that was so dreaded by its management.
As for David Geffen, who has expressed frustration with some of the previous setbacks in the years since his donation, Farley said in the interview that she had just spoken to him earlier today.
“He’s a guy who’s very efficient,” she said, “and he loves the idea of us building it all in one fell swoop.”
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