Built on the boundary between the capital’s banlieues and its affluent boulevards, the newstate-of-the-art concert hall aims for social transformation through the arts. We take a peekand ask what makes the perfect concert hall

Gillian MooreFriday 12 December 2014 12.00 GMT

he first purpose-built public concert hall in Europe, Oxford’s Holywell Music Room, isa compact, elegant space which seats just 200 people and hosts intimate concerts andstudent recitals. Prior to its first opening, in 1748, classical music had beenperformed in churches, royal courts and artistocratic houses. But the emerging

middle classes needed something more: they were making music at home but wanted tohear 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 orchestrasand building concert halls. In 1813, the newly formed Royal Philharmonic Society of Londoncommissioned the architect John Nash to renovate the Argyll Rooms opposite what isnow the Apple Store on Regent Street, London, and created a concert hall. Similar societiesin Leipzig, Vienna and Liverpool were responsible for the building of new halls for music. Asthe industrial revolution progressed, the concert halls got bigger, with venues such asBirmingham’s Greek temple-style town hall of 1834 and steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie’sfamous  1891 concert hall in New York, becoming symbols of civic pride and industrial newmoney.

More recently, concert halls have been conceived with broader social purposes in mind. TheRoyal 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 aneconomically depressed city and Sage Gateshead opened in 2004, providing a world-classconcert hall and a focal point for community music and education in the north-east ofEngland. The latest concert hall project with far-reaching social ambitions is thePhilharmonie de Paris, which will open next month on the eastern edge of the Frenchcapital.

The Philharmonie is a huge, organic structure rising up in the Parc de la Villette, the arts andscience park built just inside the boulevard périphérique on the site of the old Paris meatmarket and abattoirs. It is the latest and, sadly, possibly the last major manifestation of theenergy and willpower of Pierre Boulez, composer, conductor and the godfather of music inFrance. 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 renamedPhilharmonie 2) opened in 1995 and realised Boulez’s dream for a flexible concert hall fit forthe 21st century: wired for electronic sound, capable of changing shape and layout to

accommodate contemporary works such as his own spatial masterpiece, Repons, andincorporating a museum and education spaces. But, with 900 seats, the Cité was too smallfor big symphony orchestras, and Boulez was soon planning a bigger version.

Its construction has sparked controversy – over the location and, especially, the escalatingcosts 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 beforeits opening, the Philharmonie’s artistic lineup is attracting complaints both of elitism and ofdumbing down.

But the venue is a glamorous architectural statement, designed by French star architect JeanNouvel, whose credits include the Musée du Quai Branly and the Institut du Monde Arabe inParis as well as concert halls in Lucerne and Copenhagen. From a distance, it looks like agreat, geological mound, as if some seismic event had created a mountain. Move nearer andyou can see its external walls, billowing like folds of cloth. From yet another angle, thebuilding looks like a huge bird that has landed on the park - and Nouvel continues the aviantheme by cladding many of the outside surfaces, underfoot and on walls, with 200,000 tilesin 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 threeacoustics are generally agreed to be the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw inAmsterdam and Symphony Hall in Boston. All three were built during the second half of the19th century, the first building boom for purpose built concert halls when cities saw them asa source of civic pride. In those days, acoustics was still one of the dark arts rather than aprecise science, but these halls have in common the shoebox shape, a long rectangle inwhich the performers are positioned at one end and where straight, high walls reflect andblend the sound.

By the mid 20th century, architects believed that the formal, hierarchical layouts of theseconcert halls were outdated, reflecting the social order of their times. In the ruins of postwarBerlin, Hans Scharoun built the Berlin Philharmonie (opened in 1963) to reflect a moredemocratic ideal, a “new society” in Scharoun’s words: the performers are in the centre andthe audience encircle them in sloping terraces, an arrangement that came to be knownas the vineyard model. Scharoun employed the latest acoustic science to ensure that theBerlin hall sounds as glorious as it looks, and its vineyard design became the inspiration formany 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 inHamburg.

Simon Rattle insisted on the 19th-century shoebox shape for Symphony Hall inBirmingham, built in 1990 when he was in charge of the City of Birmingham SymphonyOrchestra. The Philharmonie de Paris has the best of both worlds. The basic designis vineyard, but some very sexy technology means that banks of seating can disappear intowalls to create a shoebox, or a standing venue for rock and pop concerts. As with thePhilharmonie in Berlin, the acoustic is enhanced by floating “clouds”, wooden acousticreflectors that control the sound in the space. And there is an ingenious solution to one ofthe key tensions in concert hall design: the need for a large volume of space for the sound toresonate, while allowing the audience to be close to the action. The Philharmonie’s banks ofseating are nested inside the much larger shell of the hall, floating free of its walls, makingfor 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 islarge enough to be very resonant.”

But the new building must fulfil a social as well as a musical function, and when visiting Iam reminded that the périphérique is more than a traffic artery. It is a social barrier: on oneside, 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 visionof “Grand Paris”, an integrated city with more equality of opportunity. The new tramlinethat weaves its way in and out of the suburbs and has a stop outside the new concert hall issymbolic 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 Coeurand central Paris to the west, or of the suburbs and the hills to the east – offer a reminder ofBayle’s desire to embrace new horizons. “This is a new vision for a concert hall – and one ofthe most important things about it is the location. Classical music has been concentrated inthe west of the city, which is wealthy; the Salle Pleyel, Radio France [which has itself justopened a new concert hall], the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. From this place, we can reachout to a whole new audience – we can unite the suburbs and the city centre – it’s GrandParis,” he says. The East wall of the building quite literally does reach out to the suburbs: agiant, digital screen will project images and words across the Peripherique towards thebanlieu of Pantin.

In the brochure for the opening season, Bayle opposes the idea that classical music shouldbe linked to social class. He wants to “break down the barriers, shake up the ritual of theconcert, prioritise education programmes for young people and make links between musicalgenres”. To do all this, he will have at his disposal a 2,200-seat concert hall, rehearsal roomswith public galleries, extensive workshop spaces which can take school groups and staffwho can look after children while parents attend a concert. There will also be a galleryspace, whose first exhibition will be the V&A’s David Bowie show, as well as cafes andrestaurants.

But what of the music? It will be a more diverse mix than is usual in French musicalinstitutions. Classical will dominate, with the Orchestre de Paris and EnsembleInterContemporain in residence, and it will provide a Paris venue for visiting Europeanorchestras such as the LSO, the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the BerlinPhilharmonic, as well as the New York Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Orchestra ofVenezuela or the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. But weekends will also be themed on topicssuch 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 ofSouthbank Centre, the Barbican, Sage Gateshead, Birmingham or Glasgow Concert Halls, itrepresents a radical step in France, where classical culture has enjoyed far higher statesupport and its importance has gone largely unchallenged. Last month, a study from theUniversity of Limoges found that the average age of classical concertgoers in France hasrisen 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 Philharmoniede Paris will be a major new landmark in Paris and a great asset to the internationalcommunity of musicians and music lovers who will enjoy its gleaming new spaces. But its

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ambitions are greater than that. It is aiming for nothing less than social transformationthrough the arts.

Gillian Moore is head of classical music at London’s Southbank Centre. Seephilharmoniedeparis.fr for details of the Philharmonie’s opening season.