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Rockwell Matters

February 11, 2008

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The Berlin Philharmonic took it upon itself recently to present a concert in honor of the 100th birthday of the birth of Herbert von Karajan, its longtime music director. It was conducted by Seiji Ozawa; it was in the Philharmonie in Berlin; and I, for my pains, was there. And after the intermission, after a rather eccentric performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by Anne Sophie-Mutter, the program turned itself over to the Pathétique Symphony of Tchaikovsky. Right toward the beginning, the violas, the section of the violas make their entrance. The sound of those violas just made me sit up on my hind haunches and my ears perked up and my tail waged. It was really quite amazing. It was a burnished, woody, wonderful, sad sound of these violas.

Now, the Berlin Philharmonic is a good band and I’m sure they have excellent instruments. But what made it special was the acoustics of the Philharmonie. In this strange era in which high-fidelity is no longer valued, and sound on records is degraded first through digitalization and now through mp3 downloads and such (so that quantity seems to count more than quality of reproduction), it’s worth thinking for a minute about the actual impact of raw sound on musical pleasure. I, myself, really came to music through records, and through Arthur Fieldler’s 25 cents a ticket concerts in the Municipal Auditorium in the summers in San Francisco. But, when I was in college I passed programs at the Symphony Hall in Boston. Which is, I would argue, the best hall in America for acoustics, and the sound of it was amazing. Far more amazing, I might add, than Carnegie Hall which I find tubby and eccentric wandering from place to place, and Fisher Hall, which is much clearer and in some ways better (although they’re about to tinker with it again), but doesn’t really handle big climaxes. The Grosse Halle of the Musikverein in Vienna is terrific but it seats 1,200 people and really can’t handle the sound of a Mahler symphony. The Disney Hall is excellent, and there are other halls in Birmingham and Tokyo that I haven’t heard that are supposed to be good, but the best hall I ever heard is the Philharmonie in Berlin. And it makes you realize there are many things that make for a great musical experience. If you are a good score reader you can just sit there and page through a Mahler symphony and hear it in your ears. Or there is the issue of the composition itself, or there is the issue of the interpretation or the quality of the orchestra, or the quality of the conductor. But the physical animal sound of what it makes in the hall is more and more, as I age into wisdom, a key to the pleasure of a music experience.

Now, acoustics is a two-fold thing. It’s what the audience hears, but it’s also what the musicians hear between themselves. Sometimes a hall will sound great but then you’ll find that the back desks violins can’t hear the back desk, whatever’s on the other side, usually violas these days, and so that the performance has suffered just through the inability to communicate on the stage. But, of course, as an audience member what for me is most important is how the thing sounds. Now the impact of acoustics on musical pleasure is not limited to classical music. A fabulous amplification system in the right hall for rock or disco or techno music also makes the experience entirely superior to crummy sound in the same way. Amplified music in a symphonic concert hall usually sounds terrible unless you mask the sound with many hangings and assorted draperies of one kind or another.

Getting back to the idea that today people don’t seem to care as much about sound. And it is true that you can hear a symphony performance from a cheesy little radio perched on your kitchen table or a bad sound system in a car and get enormous musical pleasure from it. Sound impact is not the only thing in music but it is crucial and important especially at a live concert. So I can, on the one hand, recommend that the next time you are in Berlin, go to the Philharmonie and hear the Berlin Philharmonic play there just for the visceral experience. But in the meantime, if you are disappointed by a concert sometimes, think how much of it might be simply that the sound you are hearing is not the sound that it could be, and that it can be and is in the best halls.

— John Rockwell

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