If you ask a lover of orchestral music which of the world’s concert halls have the best acoustics, you can expect their top three to include the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. But in 1881, when six citizens came together to plan a new hall on the outskirts of their city, that outcome seemed unlikely. For centuries, the Dutch had been regarded as an unmusical people: as long ago as the first century AD, Tacitus had quipped Frisia non cantat (“Frisians don’t sing”). Before the arrival of the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam had no tradition of serious concert-going. Local orchestras were poor both in finances and quality. And the architect selected for this project had never even designed a concert hall. The omens were not good.
But somehow, it all worked, and Amsterdam’s musical life was transformed. Simon Reinink, the Concertgebouw’s General Director, calls it “cluster luck”: in a combination of fortunate circumstances, the right hall was built, the right musicians came to Amsterdam, and great composers personally conducted their own works or performed as soloists. The only major conductor who refused to appear was Toscanini – jealous of the popularity of WIllem Mengelberg, the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s charismatic principal conductor.
Reinink has been attending concerts at the Concertgebouw since he was eight. “I grew up in Utrecht, in the centre of the Netherlands, and I stem from a traditional bourgeois family. My father went to concerts all the time – every month, he and I went to the Concertgebouw. Later, in the 1980s, we had the Festival of Early Music in Utrecht, which is one of the most important Early Music festivals in the world. Sometimes we went to three or four concerts per day.”
Today, he still attends five or six concerts per week: “it’s like being a farmer – you have to smell the smell of the stable, you have to get a sense of what’s going on under the roof.” Still, music wasn’t his choice of profession – he became a lawyer, later working in publishing and sitting on several boards of arts organisations – until the post of General Director fell vacant and an acquaintance put his name up for the long list (without his knowledge).
Back in 1881, the science of acoustics did not exist: the first hall to be designed using calculations made by an acoustician would be Wallace Sabine’s Boston Symphony Hall, which opened in 1900. So the Concertgebouw’s architect, Dolf van Gendt, went for a simple process of imitation. The project committee’s first choice of halls to imitate was the enormous Kaisersaal in Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle, but mercifully, that idea was abandoned when the influential Dutch composer W.F. Thooft pointed out how poor its sound was.
Eventually, van Gendt chose to blend the designs of two acoustically superior halls, the Vienna Musikverein and Leipzig’s Altes Gewandhaus. He included many more seats than either of these – but this caused a problem. Reinink explains: “the hall he designed was too long for the plot of land allocated by the city authorities. So he decided to make it shorter and broader. That’s why we have a relatively square hall, a shape that is very uncommon.”
The Concertgebouw’s grand opening in 1888 featured an orchestra of 120 and a choir of 500. The acoustics were unexceptional. But in the following years, changes were made that turned out to be significant. In 1890, an organ was built. Then, in 1900, the seating was fixed to the floor and the number of seats reduced, at the behest of the city’s fire brigade. The angle of the seating behind the stage was also altered. According to Reinink, “these three changes did the trick.”
“If you look at Boston Symphony Hall,” Reinink continues, “that was science-driven architecture: the acousticians were in charge. We did not have acousticians in charge in Amsterdam, it was just a lucky shot. The acoustic in our hall has a unique combination of precision and warmth: you can hear every individual instrument and it is overlaid with a velvet warmth of the whole orchestra. It’s a unique and magical acoustic.” The building’s smaller Recital Hall, he says, is just as good acoustically.
In the years since that “lucky accident”, the Concertgebouw has undergone various renovations. At every stage, preserving the acoustics of the two halls has been considered paramount, because there is only a limited understanding of why the halls sound the way they do. The most significant renovation was in the 1980s, when the building was found to be sinking into the soft Amsterdam earth. Like many buildings of the period, it was built on wooden piles: these were rotting and had to be replaced by concrete-filled steel pipes. Acoustic consultants Peutz recommended that the Main Hall be left untouched during the project. Indeed, it was kept open through the renovations, not least, Reinink explains, “because Bernard Haitink was afraid that the orchestra might lose its unique sound”.