PARIS (AFP) ― A new and hugely expensive Paris concert hall will get its VIP opening late Wednesday, but its star architect, Jean Nouvel, is snubbing the event because he says it is not yet ready.
“The Philharmonie is opening too early,” Nouvel, who in 2008 won architecture’s top global award, the Pritzker Prize, stormed in a long complaint printed by Le Monde newspaper.
The gala opening, in a once gritty district of northeast Paris that is rapidly gentrifying, is to attract a Who’s Who of France’s political and cultural elite, including President Francois Hollande.
The Philharmonie, a multilevel concert complex whose main hall seats 2,400 on sweeping balconies surrounding the center stage, took eight years and 386 million euros ($455 million) of public money to build ― a budget three times its initial estimate.
Nouvel, who rejects blame for the budget blow-out, railed against the decision to open the complex on its Wednesday deadline while workers are still frantically drilling and hammering, and before musicians have had sufficient time to practice in it. Months more work is needed to complete it.
“The building is being open according to a timeline that does not respect architectural and technical requirements,” Nouvel wrote.
“The Philharmonie has shot itself in each foot.”
The Philharmonie’s director, Laurent Bayle, explained in a separate interview with Le Parisien newspaper that it would have been too costly to delay the inauguration.
“We already pushed back the opening once by six months. A new delay would have cost a lot of money and posed problems because the (orchestral) program was finalized a year and a half ago,” he said.
Nouvel said he was denigrated as a “capricious star-artiste” and excluded as the Philharmonie complex was being built to his plan.
“The disdain … for the architect of the most important French cultural program of the beginning of this century bars me from expressing agreement and satisfaction by attending the opening evening,” he said, speaking of himself in the third person.
But Nouvel said he believed his latest creation will still be hailed as a “Pompidou Centre of music,” drawing a parallel between the ultra-modern Philharmonie complex and Paris’s 1977-built tube-and-glass multi-level art gallery in the center of the capital.
One of the aims of the management running the Philharmonie is to attract an audience younger than the gray-haired set that usually attends classical concerts in Paris, previously held in the Belle Epoque-styled Salle Pleyel on the other side of town, near the Champs-Elysees.
To that end, ticket prices are to be much cheaper.
The Philharmonie building has also been designed so people can walk up onto its roof. And buildings dotted around the surrounding area, known as the Cite de la Musique, already attract more modern concerts including pop, rock and jazz.
The acoustics of the main hall of the Philharmonie were designed by two masters in the field: New Zealand’s Harold Marshall and Japan’s Yasuhisa Toyota.
The idea to have the stage surrounded by seats, like in Berlin’s Philharmonie, is to have the farthest spectator just 32 meters from the orchestra conductor, far closer than in other venues.
“To be honest, Paris had some grand, historic concert halls. But the Philharmonie promises a peerless live experience in terms of acoustics,” said Douglas Boyd, the British conductor who in July will take up the baton over Paris’s Chamber Orchestra at the Philharmonie.
