Yasuhisa Toyota, acoustician of the world’s great concert halls

When it comes to concert hall acoustics, one name stands out from the pack: Yasuhisa Toyota. The list of halls where you can hear his work reads like a hit parade: the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Philharmonie de Paris, Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Suntory Hall in Tokyo... The list goes on.

I meet Toyota in the Garden Lounge of our Tokyo hotel. The sakura have just begun to blossom in the Japanese garden outside, unseasonably early (“global warming”, he muses). It all feels quintessentially Japanese and Toyota is in genial mood, but he doesn’t want our interview to get swamped in technical details: for those, he gives me a weighty tome, Concert Halls by Nagata Acoustics, published in 2020, which lists the 32 major halls he has worked on. “Barenboim told me it was an easy number to remember,” he name-drops. “It’s the same as the number of Beethoven Sonatas.”

I start by asking whether clients over the years have asked him for different things? The fundamental answer is “no”, everyone wants “a good hall” or “a world class hall”, whatever that may mean, with only a few who are interested in the numbers (like a reverberation time of 1.9 or 2.0). The constraints posed by the site are more important, especially its size and shape. In any case, Toyota says, “I can only do the things I know how to do”.

The main “thing” that Nagata Acoustics and Toyota know how to do is a “vineyard” hall (in which listeners are wrapped around the stage in tiered terraces) rather than the “shoebox” style (of which the Vienna Musikverein and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw are the most loved examples). This dates back to Nagata’s first major project, Suntory Hall, which opened in 1986. Its design decisions, heavily influenced by Herbert von Karajan, were based on those of the Berlin Philharmonie, the hall that Toyota considers to be the most important in the history of concert hall acoustics.

In the grand vineyard-shoebox debate, there are two advantages of the vineyard which he considers critical. Firstly, wrapping the audience around the stage means that on average, the seats are closer to the musicians. In a large hall like the Berlin Philharmonie, the design choice is between seats close to the orchestra but behind it, or seats far away, beyond the current back row. Toyota is sure that a typical audience member would prefer the former. Secondly, with the audience surrounding the stage, concertgoers get to see each other’s faces, which brings a dimension to the shared experience of concert attendance that you don’t get in a shoebox: “Beyond the stage, we can see the other audience’s faces. In Vienna, the rest of the audience is hidden except for the back of their heads. The back of their head doesn’t smile: this is very important.” A smaller space can become a marvel of intimacy, as exemplified by the Pierre Boulez Saal.

Should a hall be the same for different types of music? Surely, an ideal hall for Bach is not the same as one for Bruckner or Thomas Adès? Toyota demurs. He isn’t a fan of adjustable halls and he’s not convinced they’re necessary. Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin, he says, are cities where “avant-garde” music is played, but he considers those as exceptions to a broad range of places, especially outside major cities, where audiences prefer classic repertoire. And while there exist pieces of music that sound better in a highly reverberant cathedral-like acoustic, he thinks they are in the minority.

He’s also sceptical about multi-purpose halls which are used for dance, theatre or Kabuki as well as classical music. “We can look for the best compromise, but usually, we cannot get it to work for 80-90% of programmes, we can only get it to work for 60% of the audience, which means the other 40% will be disappointed.”

When it comes to concert halls, the audience size is important: for anything above 2,000, he says, the design starts to get extremely difficult (he jokes that in the Royal Albert Hall, we get to hear the same concert twice or three times, but admits that the atmosphere of being part of an audience of 5,000 is amazing). His own biggest has been the Philharmonie de Paris at 2,400. Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles was interesting because there was an unholy row between two groups of people in the project: one group, focused on the economics, wanted 2,400 seats or more; the other, focused on the best possible quality, wanted a target of no more than 2,000.

Frank Gehry, the architect for Disney, took a rational approach to the problem. He started with the concern that no seat in the audience should be too far from the stage, and from that, fixed the dimensions of the hall, without counting the number of seats. He then modelled the space, going through many iterations until he was happy with the result, whereupon he fitted in as many seats as possible. That could only be done with very small seats and tight spacing, which was unacceptable even to the economically-minded group, so the seat size was increased to a point on which everyone could agree; this resulted in the final capacity of 2,265.

A new hall takes a long time to bed down. The first rehearsal is always the most stressful time for the acoustician, far more so than opening night, because musicians always claim that they can’t hear each other. The reason, Toyota is convinced, is that everyone is nervous, to which the natural response is to play louder. When they asked the LA Phil musicians to play softer, things improved quickly.

This wasn’t the first time. When several Tokyo orchestras moved to the new Suntory Hall from their previous home at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, the musicians hated it, with the same complaint that they couldn’t hear each other on stage; the resulting poor ensemble quality was clearly evident to audiences. But when Suntory invited several big name orchestras – Vienna, Berlin, Chicago – they were full of praise for the hall. The Tokyo musicians had no option but to stop complaining and over a period of three or four years, the ensemble quality improved steadily. The musicians swore that their playing was unchanged – but no-one had tampered with the hall acoustics.

And this seems to be a universal pattern. During the Disney project, Toyota had the chance to meet Lothar Cremer, the legendary acoustician of the Berlin Philharmonie. He relates with some amusement that Cremer had suffered from exactly the same problems in Berlin. The musicians were certain that the hall acoustics had been changed, but they hadn’t: stage risers had been installed, but their purpose was for Karajan’s video shoots and not for acoustic improvement.

In the thirty years between Suntory Hall and the Elbphilharmonie, have there been any major changes to his craft? The most important development, Toyota says, was in 1995, with the advent of Windows 95 and 32-bit computing, which made it possible to calculate complex patterns of reflections. “Without a computer, the calculation is not simple. So the first order reflection and the second order may be OK. But after that, it’s almost impossible. The computer, especially the personal computer, made it possible very quickly, very cheap, very easy.”

Nagata developed its own purpose-built software, and Toyota describes the improvements as being like the progress in medicine from X-Rays to MRI scans. But calculations only go so far. “We didn’t believe that acoustics can be explained only by the numbers.” Once the calculations are done, Toyota prefers to use a physical model. These are built on a surprisingly large scale – his preference is for 1:10, which means the model for the Philharmonie de Paris was a massive 6m x 5m x 3m tall, the size of a substantial domestic bedroom, with every seat and listener modelled individually. Jean Nouvel, architect of the Philharmonie, describes Toyota as “a sorcerer at work” as he works his way around the model.

Although there are plenty of new materials around, he doesn’t consider them significant. “Even in the Elbphilharmonie, the surface material, the so-called ‘white skin’, that was something special but that wasn’t requested by us. That was the result of mutual discussion about the material; we gave the architects only the acoustical conditions, like the size of roughness or irregularity.”

Of all the halls Toyota has designed, does he have a favourite? “This is the same question I heard ten years ago, when I had a phone call from Valery Gergiev. It was January 1st, New Year’s Day and he calls me and says ‘Yasu, I’m having dinner and I’m really drunk and Mariss Jansons and I are talking about the best acoustics and concert halls. So I’m thinking that Sapporo, Kitara Hall is one of the best concert halls, but Mariss has another favourite, he says that Muza Kawasaki is the best for him. So I heard that you did both – which is better, tell me?’ He was absolutely drunk. And then I asked him the question ‘By the way, Valery, how many kids do you have?’ He stopped asking.”

Toyota is thoroughly discreet about his clients and, like any good magician, he doesn’t reveal his secrets. But perhaps the real secret lies long ago in his background as an orchestral oboist and his understanding of how different the sound balance can be in different places within the orchestra. “Actually, I was not a good oboe player, but I was a good maker of reeds. But speaking about the oboe, I think I was very lucky, because I was in the centre of the orchestra and I had many experiences in thinking about acoustics while I was in the orchestra; I learned a lot in that position.”

See forthcoming events at Suntory Hall, Tokyo.
This article was sponsored by Tokyo Tokyo.