Klaus Mäkelä on the rostrum at Geffen Corridor.
Photograph: Chris Lee
It’s taken just a few months, however the New York Philharmonic lastly sounds at dwelling in its new dwelling. That turned clear earlier this month, as quickly because the ridiculously younger Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä gave an virtually invisible nod and began a tensely ravishing efficiency of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique. The bassoon climbed slowly out of a lavatory of trembling cellos and, for the following three-quarters of an hour, brass chords glowed, Anthony McGill’s clarinet solos floated exquisitely, raucous climaxes exploded with out bursting eardrums, and strings sounded heat and clear and plush. Silences weren’t the ragged dropouts they are often, however riveting instants of stopped time and held breath.
I’ve spent lots of time lately in Geffen Corridor, switching seats and sections, attempting to substantiate or a minimum of perceive my nagging sense {that a} $550 million renovation hadn’t yielded the platinum sound it was imagined to. Acoustics refers back to the complicated trajectory of a musical molecule from the participant’s fingers or mouth, ricocheting off balconies and partitions, till it reaches a listener’s ear. What makes a room’s acoustics arduous to evaluate is that they rely as a lot on the music, the musicians, and the listener’s location as they do on the association of surfaces alongside the way in which. I sat within the orchestra when music director Jaap Van Zweden led Beethoven’s Ninth, and it was bracing to the purpose of astringency. Earlier than the renovation, the corridor was notoriously murky. Musicians struggled to listen to one another, so getting the steadiness proper was largely a matter of guesswork. Orchestral colours tended towards shades of taupe. Now it was as if I have been experiencing the rating by a freshly cleaned image window: Each element was sharp, however the entire ensemble felt out of attain and two-dimensional.
Nonetheless, it was arduous to tell apart the qualities of music-making from these of the corridor. In a later efficiency of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, Van Zweden performed like a person slapping the desk and capitalizing each different phrase. The corridor’s previous incarnation tended to muffle a few of that vehemence, so the orchestra needed to blare louder and bow tougher to get its factors throughout. Within the renovated Geffen, the impact of all that collective vigor bordered on the assaultive. The partitions appeared to give attention to sure tones (particularly above center C) and provides them an additional jolt of resonance in order that they drilled into the ear.
Getting far from the stage helped. I used to be within the rear of the higher balcony for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22, with Yefim Bronfman on the keyboard. Within the previous days, sitting up there meant being removed from the motion but enduring some nasty acoustic reflections. The equal spot is an effective deal nearer to the stage now, and when you nonetheless really feel at a take away, the sound arrives in an expensive package deal — colourful, blended, and with the serrated edges smoothed away.
How a corridor sounds is partly a stylistic selection. Shortly earlier than Geffen opened final October, I requested Philharmonic president Deborah Borda whether or not she anticipated it to yield the sort of spherical, rosy acoustics that Carnegie Corridor is legendary for. There, bass notes rumble, sharp assaults get softened like a Hollywood star’s wrinkles, and you may virtually go have a beer within the interval between a staccato orchestral chord and its closing decay. No, Borda stated: Geffen could be a “trendy corridor,” which I took to imply one with balanced and clear acoustics, evenly distributed throughout registers from piccolo to double bass. Tchaikovsky performed the opening live performance at Carnegie in 1891, and essentially the most superior style on the time known as for wealthy, velvety strings and scorching blasts of brass. Right now’s new halls deal with a far wider vary of music, with plentiful percussion, electronics, amplification, and sonic characters that vary from misty nebulae to intricately layered rhythms and sudden, high-precision shifts. An excessive amount of flattering resonance can flip a lot of that variety to mush.
After the primary weeks of the season, visitor conductors began to reach, and the music-making improved. Van Zweden was by no means an ideal match for the Philharmonic; now it appears he’s not suited to the brand new room, both. In mid-November, the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu led a program that included Bartók’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, with Daniil Trifonov and his former trainer Sergei Babayan as soloists. That point, I listened from my new favourite perch above and behind the orchestra, in seats that the refrain occupies when there’s one and audiences use when there isn’t. The piece is an ideal street take a look at for a brand new corridor: clanging, raucous, and fast in some passages; hushed and whistling in others. Right here, it seemed like some stunning loopy machine, with the 2 pianos hammering and thumping, by no means fairly in sync however getting the job carried out with loads of pleasure alongside the way in which. In that work, and in Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, the orchestra sounded extra elastic and relaxed than I had heard it shortly, as if the gamers had lastly come to understand they not wanted to struggle the area.
The Philharmonic prides itself on responsiveness: No matter a conductor calls for, and even hints at, is what the orchestra will give, no questions requested. That angle did no favors for Rafael Payare, who began December with Shostakovich’s overweening symphony of Lenin worship, the Twelfth, generally known as “The 12 months 1917.” The composer was a Soviet movie star in harmful instances, and on this work, written in 1961, he evidently tried to cudgel his real-life terrors and doubts into submission with tedious triumphalism and further doses of quantity. Geffen Corridor, maybe caught up in all of the revolutionary enthusiasm, magnified each exaggeration. By the top of the live performance, I noticed I had tensed each muscle as if armoring my ears in opposition to overload.
Which brings me again to Mäkelä, who, at 26, has already been designated the longer term chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. He’s virtually the other of Van Zweden (a former concertmaster of the Concertgebouw). With a finger on the throttle as an alternative of a boot on the pedal, he seems to seek out his job exhilarating. He adopted Payare’s Shostakovich blitz with a nuanced efficiency of the composer’s extra inner Sixth Symphony, and the ardent, wide-ranging melody of the opening sounded as if it have been being performed in a distinct Geffen Corridor. The timbre nonetheless had all the brilliant, eye-watering readability of a sunny winter day, however the bitterness was gone. Strings and winds enfolded one another in a sort of sonic yin-yang, and I finished fearing {that a} huge crescendo would terminate in ache.
Struggling has a spot in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, and Mäkelä’s interpretation was a contact on the genial aspect, favoring dance and festivities over brooding. Nonetheless, while you see a pacesetter capable of provoke an orchestra’s passions after which information them with such finesse, you recognize he’s earned his joyfulness. What’s much less clear to me is how, in a quick stint with an orchestra he’d by no means met earlier than, he managed to reset the musicians’ relationship with the constructing. Sooner or later in the course of the fall, the acoustician Paul Scarbrough returned to tinker with the corridor’s settings, so maybe Mäkelä simply lucked out on the timing. However a room sounds good when the music does, and a nonetheless unsettled and unforgiving new Geffen Corridor has put the Philharmonic on discover: We will hear you now.
