Better for Talk than Music

Long before it was built, Manhattan's new Philharmonic Hall was pronounced an acoustical masterpiece. Only the greatest elements of the world's greatest halIs would be used, the promises ran. Philharmonic Hall would be the quintessence of greatness. Now that the hall has been open for three months, the critics have had ample time to listen to its music. Studied in concert, their varying conclusions ring with a kind of atonal discord. The new Philharmonic Hall, they have reported on one occasion or another, is confused, honest, imbalanced, weak, loud, intimate, percussive, dry. mushy, uncolored and artificial.

Whatever its faults, the major acoustical problem at Philharmonic Hall remains what it was at the start: hearing the music over all the chatter about how it sounds. High-fidelity buffs, who praise their stereo sets because they sound like concert halls, attack the hall because it sounds like a stereo set. Players in the Philadelphia Orchestra have said they far preferred their previous visits to Carnegie Hall--but that may only be because they knew how to find the old men's room. With so much talk in the air about the mysteries of acoustics, musicians who might well sound weak anywhere leave Philharmonic Hall grumbling about its sound while their audience goes home confused; even such a trained listener as New Yorker Music Critic Winthrop Sargeant has claimed to be so baffled by the hall's effect on the music that he could scarcely tell whether he liked a performance there or not.

The two faults most frequently noted at Philharmonic Hall are the swallowed bass notes and the bright, unorchestrated sounds of the violins and high woodwinds. Cellos basses and harpsichords have gone unheard, and in soft passages, pianists sometimes sound as if they had no left hand. Technicians have busily the hall to suit various events, but their work bolstered the music, it had no effect on the din of complaint.

The hall's publicity, once so unrelentingly immodest, is beginning to sound as if the critics wrote it. "I think there are some problems." says Lincoln Center President William Schuman. ''but they can be corrected. We said at the beginning it would take a year to make adjustments. I don't want to predict what we are going to do, but we've collected a lot of data, and in a few weeks we will decide our next move." Meanwhile, the hall remains perfect for provoking talk, if not for listening to music. Says Schuman, adopting a metaphor to suit the controversy: "Criticism of acoustics depends on many things. Each man rides his own hobbyhorse in this thing."

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