Art: Symphony in the Round

Symphony audiences have traditionally had to face the music from the loud end of the horn; most concert halls put the orchestra on a stage and send the sound through a proscenium arch. German Architect Hans Scharoun, 70, the cigar-puffing, beret-topped president of West Berlin’s Academy of Arts, believes that this is thoughtless imitation of the theater or the opera. He had observed that listeners at jamfests naturally circled around the musicians, and wanted to test his idea that “the natural location of music, spatially and optically, is in the center of a music hall.”

His test, which cost $4,125,000, is the new Berlin Philharmonic Hall, inaugurated last week after six years of construction on a site only 154 yds. from the Berlin Wall. Like modern atonal music, the hall is asymmetrical, a polygonal loft in concrete that from its mustard-colored exterior resembles a huge aluminum-roofed circus tent with stiff ridgepoles. Berliners hope that landscaping will mitigate its bareness, and stake the hall’s claim to greatness on its interior.

No walls or pillars obscure the vast interior. The audience pitches onto the orchestra from slanting levels like irregular alpine slopes. One-third of the 2,200 seats are in front of the Philharmonic’s conductor, Herbert von Karajan. “Admittedly, it is a new form,” says the architect, “but one which I believe is more in tune with our times.”

There are 136 pyramidal ceiling reflectors for sound, but no one is eager to tinker with them. At its opening, Scharoun’s new hall seemed acoustically excellent as Von Karajan filled its angular spaces with squiggles of sound from softest pianissimo to heftiest fortissimo, leading his firstchair men through a delicate movement of a Haydn string quartet and then the full orchestra through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Critics breathed sighs of relief over the splendid sound—function, it seemed, had not been betrayed by revolutionary form.