Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts is widely considered to be one of the two or three finest concert halls in the world, alongside Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and Vienna's Grosser Musikvereinssaal. As New York Times associate editor R.W. Apple, Jr. wrote of Symphony Hall, it “need not take a back seat, aesthetically or acoustically, even to the Musikverein in Vienna”¹. It is the home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. For other instances of Boston, see Boston (disambiguation) Boston is the capital and largest city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. ... A Concert hall is a cultural building, which serves as performance venue, chiefly for classical instrumental music. ... The Concertgebouw is a concert hall in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. ... Categories: Buildings and structures stubs ... The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ... Raymond Walter Apple, Jr. ... Categories: Buildings and structures stubs ... Vienna (German: Wien [viːn]; Hungarian: Bécs, Czech: Vídeň, Slovak: Viedeň, Romany Vidnya; Serbian: Beč) is the capital of Austria, and also one of Austrias nine states (Land Wien). ... The Boston Symphony Orchestra is one of the worlds most renowned orchestras. ... The Boston Pops Orchestra was founded in 1885 as a subsection of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. ...

Symphony Hall was inaugurated on October 15, 1900, after the Orchestra's original home (the Old Boston Music Hall) was threatened by road-building and subway construction. Architects McKim, Mead and White engaged Wallace Clement Sabine, a young assistant professor of physics at Harvard University, as their acoustical consultant, and Symphony Hall became the first auditorium designed in accordance with scientifically derived acoustical principles. October 15 is the 288th day of the year (289th in Leap years). ... 1900 (MCM) is a common year starting on Monday. ... McKim, Mead, and White was the premier architectural firm in the eastern United States at the turn of the twentieth century. ... Wallace Clement Sabine (June 13, 1868 - January 10, 1919) was an American physicist who founded the field of architectural acoustics. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ...

The Hall was modeled on the old Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig, and is relatively long, narrow, and high, in a rectangular "shoebox" shape like Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and Vienna's Musikvereinssaal. It is 61 feet high, 75 feet wide, and 125 long from the lower back wall to the front of the stage. Stage walls slope inward to help focus the sound. With the exception of its wooden floors, the Hall is built of brick, steel, and plaster, with modest decoration. Side balconies are very shallow to avoid trapping or muffling sound, and the coffered ceiling and statue-filled niches along three sides help provide excellent acoustics to essentially every seat. Conductor Herbert von Karajan, in comparing it to the Musikverein, stated that "for much music, it is even better... because of the slightly lower reverberation time." Leipzig ▶(?) [] (Sorbian/Lusatian: Lipsk) is the largest city in the federal state (Bundesland) of Saxony in Germany. ... Herbert von Karajan (April 5, 1908 – July 16, 1989) was an Austrian conductor. ...

The sixteen Greek and Roman statue replicas lining its walls were installed as an echo of the frequently quoted words, "Boston, the Athens of America," written by Bostonian William Tudor in the early 19th century. Ten are of mythical subjects, and six of historical figures; all are plaster reproductions cast by P. P. Capronia and Brother. Beethoven's name is enscribed over the stage. He was the only musician's name put in Symphony Hall, as he was the only composer that the original directors could fully agree upon. The hall's leather seats are still original from 1900. First issue of the North American Review with signature of its editor William Tudor. ... Ludwig van Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827) was a German composer of Classical music, the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. ...

Symphony Hall seats 2,625 people during Symphony season, 2,371 during the Pops season, and up to 800 for dinner.

The organ

The Symphony Hall organ, a 4,800-pipe Aeolian-Skinner (Opus 1134) designed by G. Donald Harrison and installed in 1949, is considered one of the finest concert hall organs in the world. It replaced the hall's first organ, built in 1900 by George S. Hutchings of Boston, which was electrically keyed, with 62 ranks of nearly 4,000 pipes set in a chamber 12 feet deep and 40 feet high. The Hutchings organ had fallen out of fashion by the 1940s when lighter, clearer tones became preferred. E. Power Biggs, often a featured organist for the orchestra, lobbied hard for a thinner bass sound and accentuated treble. The 1949 Aeolian-Skinner reused and modified more than 60% of the existing Hutchings pipes, and added 600 new pipes in a Positiv division. The original diapason pipes, 32 feet in length, were reportedly sawed into manageable pieces for disposal in 1948. In 2003 the organ was thoroughly overhauled by Foley-Baker Inc., reusing its chassis and many pipes, but enclosing the Bombarde and adding to it the long-desired Principal (flute) pipes, adding a new Solo division, and reworking its chamber for better sound projection. Aeolian-Skinner was a builder of a large number of pipe organs in the first part of the 20th century. ... G. Donald Harrison G. Donald Harrison (April 21, 1889 - June 14, 1956) has crafted some of the finest and largest organs in the United States. ... Edward George Power Biggs (March 29, 1906 - March 10, 1977), but always known as E. Power Biggs, was one of the most influential classical organists of the twentieth century. ...

External links

www.bostonsymphonyhall.org

References

• Note 1: R.W. Apple, Jr., Apple's America (North Point Press, 2005), ISBN 0-86547-685-3.
• Boston Symphony Orchestra, Program Notes, Saturday, October 1, 2005.