The coronavirus pandemic has dealt a devastating blow to performing arts institutions across the country, closing its theaters and stealing ticket revenue. But for the New York Philharmonic and the Lincoln Center, this also offered a silver lining: the opportunity to accelerate David Geffen Hall’s lengthy renovation.
With shows in the hall canceled since March 2020, construction has started for real in the past few months. The works are expected to continue for the next year and a half, with a reopening scheduled for the fall of 2022, the orchestra and the center announced on Monday.
This is a year and a half ahead, although it carries the disadvantage that the Philharmonic will not be at Geffen for the wave of triumphant cultural returns expected across the country this fall, assuming the pandemic will ebb.
The orchestra, however, will still spend much of its next season at Lincoln Center, with most of its performances at Alice Tully Hall or the Rose Theater, alongside forays into Carnegie Hall and other venues. Although she plans to announce her full program in early June, Deborah Borda, chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in a video interview with other orchestra and center leaders that she anticipated concerts on a smaller scale and without breaks, at least at the beginning.
It was, said Borda, “the most challenging season I have scheduled”. But, she added, “I think there will be an explosion of pent-up demand from the public. How many more Zoom shows can we broadcast? “
The renovation of Geffen Hall is expected to cost $ 550 million, of which $ 500 million has been raised, said Henry Timms, president of Lincoln Center, in the interview. He added that “significant” individual donations were promised, but that he was not ready to announce other nominal gifts in addition to the $ 100 million from entertainment mogul David Geffen who started the project in 2015.
“In 2020, rightly, people’s minds were elsewhere and we had many other challenges as organizations,” said Timms. “But as soon as we reached the end of the year, the opportunity became clear: can we do this before? It was a period in which many people mobilized to support the project, as they saw it as a story of recovery, a way to invest in the economic and human recovery of the city ”.
The old plan foresaw progression in stages to limit the interruption of the Philharmonic, which would never have missed an entire season in the hall. Katherine Farley, chairman of the Lincoln Center, said the new schedule would not diminish the scope of the renovation, which aims to make the dull corridor more aesthetically and acoustically attractive. The seats will wrap around the stage, which will be pulled forward 25 feet to what is currently Row J, bringing a greater sense of intimacy to what may look like a cavernous shoe box. The new space will have about 2,200 seats, compared to 2,738.
The walls will be resurfaced to improve the resonance of the hall, especially the low frequencies. Tight lobbies and other public spaces will be expanded and improved by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who in 2019 joined a team that also includes Diamond Schmitt Architects, who is working inside the auditorium; Akustiks, an acoustic design company; and Fisher Dachs Associates, a theater design company.
The Philharmonic didn’t fully darken during the pandemic. In late summer and early fall last year, he brought small groups of musicians around the city in a rented pickup truck for pop-up performances, and said he would be back on the road this spring. Its NYPhil + subscription streaming service was unveiled in February, featuring archival shows and some new content. On April 14th and 15th, a contingent of players will perform for a small audience at Shed, 30 blocks south of Lincoln Center, with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. (Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, was unavailable due to overseas appointments, although he was in New York recently to record two shows for NYPhil +.)
But his losses were overwhelming. The orchestra projected that canceling its 2020-21 season resulted in $ 21 million in lost ticket revenue, in addition to the $ 10 million lost in the final months of its season last spring. (Part of this was mitigated by emergency fundraising.) Even when live performances are resumed, despite Borda’s optimistic predictions, the box office may not recover immediately.
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 percent cut in the musicians’ base salary until August 2023. Payment will then be gradually increase until the contract expires in September 2024, although at that point the musicians still receive less than they were before the pandemic.
The renovation of Geffen Hall – which opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall and was called Avery Fisher Hall from 1976 – has been pending and postponed for years, going through plans and architects. At one point, in the early 2000s, the exasperated Philharmonic planned a return to his old home, Carnegie Hall; this plan failed, further damaging the relationship between the orchestra and the Lincoln Center, its landlord, who also uses the hall for his own musical performances and corporate locations. Completing in 2012, a $ 1.2 billion redevelopment of center-left improvements throughout – but the expensive corridor overhaul has not been included.
Then, in 2015, Geffen restarted the project with the donation that gave its name to the show. Construction was due to start in 2019, but it stopped well before that amid logistical problems and management turnover at the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center. That plan provided for the salon to end in time for the 2021-22 season. It was a schedule that the orchestra and the center doubted was feasible, but if they had been able to stick to it, the renovated hall would be ready to open at a time when the city hopes to emerge from the long closure of the pandemic.
Borda was hired in 2017 largely to put the renovation back on track; in her previous work leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she brought the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall to the finish line. In New York, she pushed for a less flashy and more viable scheme than some of the proposed options – less likely to blow her budget and designed to unfold in stages, limiting the stretches in which the Philharmonic would be exiled.
Staying away from the salon for several years was considered an existential threat to his audience’s loyalty. Ironically, if Geffen reopens as now scheduled, the orchestra will have been out of their home for almost two and a half seasons in a row – exactly the situation that was so feared by its administration.
As for David Geffen, who has expressed frustration with some of the previous setbacks in the years since his present, Farley said in the interview that she had just spoken to him that day.
“He’s a guy who likes efficiency,” she said, “and loves the idea that we are building everything at once.”