New York Philharmonic’s Revamped David Geffen Hall Opens At Lincoln Center, Welcoming Local Community

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer provided a most apt description of Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall—the revamped Avery Fisher Hall that is the home of the New York Philharmonic—at the hall’s recent ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Presiding over the festivities with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Schumer said, “Both Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic are an institution, not just in this great city but in the whole world. Any time the New York Philharmonic plays a note, the world hears it and the world listens.

“So it’s been long overdue that the Philharmonic should have a concert space that befits its reputation and stature in the music world.”

The hall is named after benefactor and entertainment mogul David Geffen, who donated $100 million to Lincoln Center in 2015 to renovate Avery Fisher Hall, called Philharmonic Hall when it opened in 1962 with acoustics that were highly criticized. In 2019 Lincoln Center revealed a new, $550 million plan to make the hall more intimate by reducing the number of seats from 2,700 to 2,200, and to upgrade its acoustics; at that time the new hall was slated to open in March 2024.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic—which ended live performances by the Philharmonic and others at Geffen Hall—unexpectedly enabled Lincoln Center to speed up the revamp of the hall, allowing it to open this fall. As Schumer also pointed out at the ribbon-cutting, the opening took place “two years ahead of schedule. When have we heard of anything in a big construction job being two years ahead of schedule?”

As Henry Timms, president and chief executive of Lincoln Center explained during a pre-opening tour of the hall, the center “for 60 years tried to create a world-class venue” to hear the Philharmonic perform.

“We didn’t want this just to sound great, we wanted it to stand for something,” to reimagine the spaces that surround the theater to “engage more people, to make more people feel more welcome at Lincoln Center—those were our big priorities,” he said.

To accomplish these many goals, Lincoln Center sought out a number of experts. The architects of the hall’s public spaces are New York-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, whose other projects include the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia museum, and the Obama Presidential Center, in Chicago, while the architect of the new theater is Toronto-based Diamond Schmitt Architects, designer of the Senate of Canada Building in Ottawa and Mariinsky II in St. Petersburg, Russia. The theater’s new acoustic design is by Paul Scarbrough of Norwalk, Conn.-based Akustiks.

Highlights of the new hall include a new welcome center, opening onto Broadway, with seating and a snack cart; a new lobby that is double the size of its predecessor and features lounge seating, concessions, a bar and a 50-foot media wall; a new restaurant, Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, with Afro-Caribbean cuisine by the Bronx-born, Top Chef star; and a new Grand Promenade, more spacious than its predecessor.

To achieve Lincoln Center’s goal of making the hall’s theater—renamed the Wu Tsai Theater, in honor of a $50 million gift by Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai—more accessible, the architects moved the stage forward by 25 feet and created wraparound seating that surrounds the orchestra. To improve the hall’s acoustics, it reconstructed side tiers, resurfaced the walls and installed an adjustable canopy over the musicians, which it said would “allow for fine-tuning of the theater’s sound.”

The new design also allows for multiple stage configurations that can be used for a variety of purposes, including solo as well as symphonic performances, popular entertainment, staged opera and film. The latest technology will allow the Philharmonic and others to livestream performances.

Lincoln Center’s desire, described by Timms, to reach new, broader audiences will be achieved in many ways. The media wall in the hall’s lobby is displaying live simulcast events and performances, as well as visual art, free of charge, while the new Sidewalk Studio, a former conference room at the southwest corner of 65^th Street and Broadway, is a venue for community gatherings, rehearsals and performances. All performances of the Philharmonic’s subscription concerts and Young People’s Concerts are being livestreamed free of charge on the media wall; visitors can find seating in the new lobby and listen to them.

Working with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, Lincoln Center also commissioned new artworks for the hall, which it said it hopes will help welcome “all who visit with generosity, warmth and fun.”

Nina Chanel Abney’s San Juan Heal is an installation on the hall’s almost 200-foot-long, 65^th Street façade, inspired, Lincoln Center said, “by the rich cultural heritage and complex history of San Juan Hill,” the neighborhood where the hall is located that was once populated by indigenous and immigrant communities. (San Juan Hill, in fact, inspired a new, immersive multimedia work by Etienne Charles that was performed at the hall last month.) Abney’s installation features portraits of San Juan Hill’s pioneers and musicians, text derived from protest flyers and, in the center, the word “Love.”

A new video by Jacolby Satterwhite, An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time, being shown on the hall’s lobby media wall, “tells a new story of the past, present and future of Lincoln Center . . .set into a digitally animated landscape inspired by Central Park and surrounded by buildings reminiscent of Times Square,” Lincoln Center said.

Upcoming holiday programming at the hall—designed to take advantage of its many new features—includes a new, free “Winter Light Livestream” at noon on December 1 on the lobby media wall, transporting visitors to “a winter wonderland” at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Greece; a “Nightcap” concert with contemporary classical quintet TAK Ensemble on December 3 in the Sidewalk Studio; a concert December 6 by New York Philharmonic creative partner Chris Thile, featuring Punch Brothers, Thile’s folk ensemble, and others; a NY Phil @ Noon concert, also in the Sidewalk Studio, on December 15, with choose-what-you-pay pricing; the Philharmonic’s traditional year-end performances of Handel’s Messiah and holiday brass music; as well as screenings of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, with the Philharmonic performing John Williams’ score.

And for those who couldn’t attend the hall’s opening in person, PBS is offering a broadcast of the October 28 opening concert, featuring the world premiere of a work by Puerto Rican composer Angelica Negron that PBS said celebrates “the ritual of gathering around music and art,” as well as “Ode to Joy,” the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.