Starting Over

Even before it opened in 1962, the late conductor George Szell pronounced Philharmonic Hall, the first building in Manhattan's Lincoln Center, a disaster. "Tear it down and start over!" he cried. But that was unthinkable. The house had everything money ($19.7 million) could buy. It was an austere, stately structure of travertine and glass. There were comfortable plush chairs and, most significant musically, 106 panels suspended from the ceiling to diffuse sound waves for maximum -- it was hoped -- acoustical excellence. They did not do the job. The sound was dry, weak in bass, lacking in focus.

In the years that followed, Philharmonic Hall, despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, became a classic case of aural bad luck. The final blow apparently came last fall when two of its most eminent visitors, the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, announced that they would move back next season to venerable Carnegie Hall where the sound is warm.

Last week Lincoln Center decided that Szell had been right. Renamed Avery Fisher Hall in September 1973 in recognition of a gift of some $10 million from a pioneer manufacturer of hi-fi equipment, the structure will be closed for five months starting in May 1976. Its entire inner auditorium will be demolished and rebuilt. The cost is put, optimistically perhaps, at $3 million. In charge of the renovations will be Acoustician Cyril M. Harris of Columbia University. He was responsible for the excellent sound in the Metropolitan Opera, and tuned the various halls at Washington's Kennedy Center and, most spectacularly, the new Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis (TIME, Nov. 4). "They've never heard good bass in Fisher Hall," says Harris. If Harris lives up to his record, there will be bass -- not to mention treble -- aplenty come 1976.

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