David McNew - GETTY
The 2,265-seat Disney Concert Hall, offers perfect acoustics. The seats are covered in a bright floral pattern creating a lighter ambience for the musicians onstage.
LOS ANGELES -- The first music played inside Disney Concert Hall was Beethoven, at a test-run rehearsal in 2003. Halfway through the first movement, the story goes, Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen stopped, turned to architect Frank Gehry and said, "I think we'll keep it."
Good call.
Disney Concert Hall, the LA Philharmonic's home for the past eight years, has some of the finest acoustics on the planet, thanks to the work of Gehry and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. But sound is just one of many notable aspects of this building, whose profile will take your breath away the first time you see it. Constructed of curved metal, the exterior looks like unfurled sails on some exotic alien ship setting off for another galaxy.
As overseen by Gehry, one of the world's most celebrated architects, Disney is a marvelous place. The overall look and feel is similar to the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao Museum in Spain, with every aspect meticulously planned and perfectly executed down to the smallest detail.
For example, the 2,265 seats inside are covered in a brightly colored floral pattern that Gehry dubbed "Lillian" in honor of primary benefactor Lillian Disney (Walt Disney's widow). You don't notice that during concerts when the seats are filled with listeners. But when the chairs are up during rehearsals, they create a lighter ambience for the musicians onstage. So does the ample natural lighting from the upper corners of the building, and Gehry's use of a soothing, restful shade of blue as a neutral color the way other designers use white.
No bad seats
The hall has vineyard-style seating with terraced rows very close to the stage. Sixty percent of the seats have traditional front-on views of the stage, 30 percent are on the side and 10 percent are behind.
The sound is perfect no matter where you are.
Visually, the interior hall's dominant feature is the massive pipe organ with curved wooden pipes (reminiscent of gigantic French fries). The walls are made from birch, the same wood cellos are made of. The musicians onstage walk on Alaskan cedar, while the audience treads on oak.
Other features of the complex include Patina, celebrity chef Joachim Splichal's French/California cuisine restaurant; an outdoor garden that is the smallest state park in California, with a lovely rose-shaped fountain made of blue Delft porcelain; and a small children's amphitheater for outdoor programs. Disney Concert Hall is a classy facility, and it has rubbed off on the surrounding part of downtown Los Angeles.
"It's hard to overstate how much Disney has changed this area," said Chad Smith, the orchestra's vice president of artistic planning. "There's a new cathedral nearby, a new performing arts high school, Colburn conservatory, a museum of contemporary art. A lot of derelict buildings have been converted to artist studio spaces. And the hall has really allowed us to expand the scope of the orchestra."
A winning design
Before Disney Concert Hall was built, the LA Philharmonic's principal venue was nearby Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, its home since 1964.
"Chandler is not perfect acoustically," Smith said with great understatement. "It works well for everything, but the down side is it's not really great for anything."
In 1987, Lillian Disney gave a $50 million gift to build a major dedicated concert hall. Gehry won the competition to design it in 1988 with a design of stacked stone hexagonal blocks. But code changes in the wake of Los Angeles' 1994 earthquake forced that design to be scrapped in favor of sculpted bent metal.
The project collapsed over budget concerns as the estimated construction cost soared above $200 million. It was revived in the late 1990s and constructing it took four years, at a cost of $274 million.
Disney Concert Hall's iconic exterior has made it popular for movies, television shows and even video games. It also earned the ultimate pop-culture seal of approval, getting spoofed on an episode of "The Simpsons" (2005's "The Seven-Beer Snitch").
Gehry envisioned the hall as "the living room of the city." The complex includes an underground parking garage with 2,200 parking spaces, far more than needed for the hall. But the garage is the perfect place to park if one is called for jury duty. People who do that wind up walking through the facility, as Gehry intended.
But don't settle for just a quick walk-through. The best way to experience the hall is to hear a concert there. The LA Philharmonic is one of the top orchestras in the world, a reputation that is only growing under the helm of its charismatic young music director Gustavo Dudamel.
So go. Truly, there's not a bad seat in the house.
