Hall of Harmony Beside the Lake

by Andrew Clark (excerpts) / The Financial Times (September 14, 1998)

Seen from across the lake, Lucerne’s Cultural and Congress Centre merges imperceptibly with the city skyline. Only close up do you notice the enormous overhang of the roof, the traffic-free waterfront location and the sense of an outsize music-box waiting to be entered and explored. Jean Nouvel’s latest grand project is neither architectural conceit nor functional monstrosity, but a happy marriage of artistic ideals and practical imperatives.

Surrounded by Alpine views, it has just about the most spectacular setting of all the world’s major concert halls, and Nouvel responds with unusual restraint: his building harmonises with, rather than dominates, its surroundings. But the real miracle lies within, intangible and invisible. The acoustic engineered by Russell Johnson easily matches the wonders of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, on which Johnson worked so profitably a decade ago. The difference is that Lucerne’s new hall is more elegant and intimate.

You might wonder what this architectural-acoustical jewel is doing in a Swiss city of only 60,000 people. Shut off from the musical mainstream for most of the year, Lucerne has yet to answer the question satisfactorily: the programme for the winter months consists mainly of bargain-basement imports and small scale community promotions.

The hall’s raison d’etre is the Lucerne music festival, a star-studded event which has long outgrown its previous venue. The only way the festival could get a new building was to tie it to the city’s ambitions as a tourist and conference centre. And in a country where every major public spending initiative needs local endorsement at the ballot box, that meant proving to the widest range of interest groups, from hoteliers to yodelling clubs, that they had a stake in the building.
The result is a Sfr205m (£87m) venue of which everyone can be proud. The art museum, conference hall and two flexible smaller halls will not open until next year; but the concert hall, inaugurated last month to coincide with the festival’s 60th anniversary, has already established itself as worthy of the world’s leading orchestras.

All are housed behind a facade of glass, steel-mesh and aluminum, and sheltered by a vast pagoda-like canopy - the building’s only concession to monumentalism. Reaching unsupported for 30 meters towards the waterside, the canopy not only offers shelter from the elements, but harmonises the building with the horizontal expanse of the lake. It invites you to spend the intervals outside - for which purpose a long, open-fronted bar has been furnished.
That’s just as well, because Nouvel doesn’t seem to want anyone to linger en route to or from the concert hall. Shielded by the canopy, the building’s open-fronted balconies are denied the prospect of mountains and sky, and the tiny foyers are almost as darkly idiosyncratic as Nouvel’s opera house at Lyons, with horrifyingly low ceilings, narrow corridors and conspiratorial spotlights. The impact in Lucerne is leavened by the rosewood decor, as if you’re skirting the base of a mammoth stringed instrument or the bowels of a ship.

Once inside the moulded shoebox auditorium, all is sweetness and light. It’s a bit like a private temple to music, with plaster walls, wooden organ gallery and a night-sky ceiling of unparalleled height. Its pristine comfort masks a litany of horse-trading during the building process. Nouvel wanted smooth walls; Johnson insisted on reflective devices - and the compromise is an attractive surface of indented reliefs. Nouvel wanted red and blue decor; Claudio Abbado, representing musicians closely associated with the festival, demanded something milder, and the result is a soft white. Nouvel objected to Johnson’s trademark echo-chambers; to his credit he backed down, painting them an infernal red.

The 1,840 capacity (420 less than Birmingham) is Johnson’s ideal - a bit small for an international festival, but unlike Baden-Baden’s ill-fated new theatre, not so big that it will embarrass its users in the off-season. There are four slim balconies and a smattering of Oregon pine around the stage. As for sound quality, you don’t get much more truthful than this. It is transparent, gently resonant and quite unforgiving, but with the same balance wherever you sit. Musicians clearly love it - and so do audiences, buoyed by the close contact with the stage. The 20th century has not, on the whole, been renowned for its success in concert hall design. In Lucerne’s new venue, we can draw compensation from all those failed adventures. It is a meeting point of art and science, the avant-garde and tradition - a building music lovers will want to return to again and again.

For his seventh and final year as festival intendant, Matthias Bamert put together an appropriately lavish programme - a “festival of festivals,” with contributions from Bayreuth, Salzburg and the London Proms, plus the usual glittering array of orchestras and soloists. These were augmented by a downmarket series of events aimed at the wider Lucerne public - who, before Bamert started loosening the festival’s boundaries, felt marginalised by the festival’s expensive image. Countering that feeling, without compromising standards, has been one of Bamert’s achievements, and he hands over an organization in rude health to 37-year old Michael Haefliger, currently manager of the Davos festival.

Another hallmark of Bamert’s work in Lucerne has been his promotion of contemporary music. The choice of Heinz Holliger as this year’s composer-in-residence helped to mitigate the absence of a commissioned work to inaugurate the new hall. Holliger is Switzerland’s musical conscience - virtuosic, slightly eccentric, defying the predictable or conventional - and his music reflects those qualities. The centerpiece of Lucerne’s Holliger retrospective was a concert in which he conducted the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in works ranging from his first published orchestral essay to his recent Violin Concerto.

Tonscherben (1985) - 15 minutes of sonic fragments, ingeniously musicked - showcased the demonstration quality of the hall’s acoustic, as well as making a smashing concert-opener. But Holliger is more than just an expert manipulator of sound. Cornelia Kallisch’s rendition of five songs (1960/1993) inspired by poems of Georg Trakl underlined his gift for exploring the inner world of the psyche.