The newly renovated Alice Tully Hall – Photo: Robert Polidori
Alice Tully Hall, long reviled for its poor public spaces and horribly dry acoustics, has just undergone a $159 million renovation, and the initial response from both architecture critics and the musician tenants of the hall is very good. The hall’s main tenant is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Of local interest is that the Tully/Juilliard complex part of Lincoln Center was designed by Portland’s own adopted son Pietro Belluschi, along with Eduardo Catalano.
Here’s some reading/viewing that will get you up to speed on the renovation and its results:
First, a slideshow of the interior of the concert hall and a sampling of the musicians’ thoughts on the improved acoustics of the hall can be found here. (The New York Times)
The musicians, acoustical experts and Lincoln Center officials in attendance all proclaimed the hall much more present, alive and reverberant than the old Tully, which had been widely faulted for its dry sound. That was the initial impression, but a highly provisional one. A hall reveals its true nature only with a full audience in the seats.
“Oh my God, it’s heaven,†said Anne-Marie McDermott, the pianist, after playing a Steinway on the stage. “You can do anything: the clarity, the range.†She called the sound fat, rich and buttery, and unfamiliar from pre-renovation days. “I wouldn’t have recognized it,†she said.
The renovation has transformed the hall, which had been largely unchanged since its opening in 1969. A vast new glass-enclosed lobby, almost 10 times larger, juts like a ship’s prow toward the corner of 65th Street and Broadway, with an extension of the Juilliard School forming the roof. An offstage warm-up room was added, and the green rooms and dressing rooms were spruced up.
Next, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger writes his view of the new iteration of Alice Tuly Hall, and how it now relates better to the city around it, here, and you can take a video tour of the new hall with Goldberger, here.
Alice Tully Hall, and the Juilliard School complex of which it is a part, were the last elements of Lincoln Center to be built, and when they opened, in 1969, they seemed like an ambitious attempt to bring cutting-edge brutalism to the place. That’s probably why so many architecture critics liked them and so many other people didn’t. Amid the tepid classicism of so much of Lincoln Center, Juilliard stood out as something totally nineteen-sixties, all cantilevers and boxy geometries. Granted, it was covered in travertine, to match its genteel neighbors, but that served only to make the building seem ill at ease, like a wrestler dressed in a Sunday suit.
The building was a misfit in other ways, too. Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center’s main venue for chamber music and recitals, was supposed to be its most conspicuous public element, but the entrance was half hidden behind a stairway that led up to a bleak, windswept plaza. It was also separated from the street by a small, virtually useless triangular plaza, a result of the insistence by the architects, Pietro Belluschi and Eduardo Catalano, on a rectangular building, even though the site, facing the diagonal of Broadway, was a trapezoid. If you were going to Juilliard instead of to Alice Tully, the front door was even harder to find—off the plaza, one level above the street.
I can’t wait to see what responses the first concerts in the new space will bring, very exciting!