KINGDOM COME.(Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The old American concert halls were built not just to usher in the right sort of people but to keep the wrong sort out. Upper-crust music lovers believed that they alone had the education and the cultivation to grasp the European masterpieces. The typical hall became a self-conscious cathedral of culture from which vulgar enthusiasms were expunged. The musicians were placed on a raised platform at one end of the room, and a proscenium surrounded them as a heavy frame surrounds a Rembrandt. Time stopped; music became an artifact in a collection. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, orchestras are in the unhappy position of reaping what they sowed. The audience is thinning out, ultimate wealth seeks its validation elsewhere, and nineteenth-century styles of concert presentation have proved unalluring to the young. Orchestras are now trying to undo the work of their forebears and to engage the culture around them, but the halls themselves, Victorian beings, have a way of resisting change.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is born from an entirely different mentality. The name, to begin with, signifies something other than yesterday's Social Register snobbery: Disney, with his Stravinsky music video in "Fantasia," did as much as anyone to bring modern composition to a broad public. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic's music director, is a coolly creative Finn who has partly supplanted the usual Austro-German fare with a lean diet of Stravinsky, Bartok, and Shostakovich. Frank Gehry, the building's architect, is a singular sort of pop avant-gardist, whose parabolic forms are instantly fixed in the public mind. Ernest Fleischmann, the Philharmonic's former managing director and abiding eminence grise, has long plotted to abandon the old paradigm of the Beethoven-centered, status-obsessed orchestra; it was mostly under his influence that Lillian Disney, Walt's widow, came up with the...

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