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      New York Philharmonic Agrees to Restore Pay for Musicians

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      After a stronger-than-expected season, the orchestra said it would reverse pay cuts imposed at the height of the pandemic.When the coronavirus pandemic erupted in 2020, battering the cultural sector and forcing the New York Philharmonic to cancel a season, the orchestra worked to cut costs, slashing its musicians’ pay by 25 percent.The Philharmonic promised at the time to reverse those cuts, which provided more than $20 million in savings, once its financial outlook brightened. And on Monday, the orchestra announced it would do so in September, much earlier than expected.The decision to restore pay is a milestone in the Philharmonic’s recovery, and it offered some hope that the worst of the pandemic, which cost the orchestra more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue, had passed.“There’s nothing more important than our musicians,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “It was just a very important act to make.”Borda said government grants and loans, an increase in donations and better-than-expected ticket sales during the 2021-22 season made the decision possible. The orchestra is on track to finish its season without missing a performance, and it just concluded a series of concerts in Europe, at a time when many ensembles have been unable to tour.“We’re in a different phase of life now,” she said.Geffen Hall, seen here in March, will reopen in fall.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe Philharmonic is at a pivotal moment. The $550 million renovation of its home, David Geffen Hall, is to be completed in the fall. And the orchestra is searching for a music director to replace its departing leader, Jaap van Zweden, who steps down in 2024.The pay cuts had been a source of distress among players as the Philharmonic prepared for its new chapter.In December 2020, the Philharmonic and its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included 25 percent cuts to base pay, which was then around $2,900 per week, through August 2023. Under the deal, pay was set to gradually increase until the expiration of the contract in September 2024, though musicians would have been paid less at the end than they were before the pandemic.But as coronavirus cases fell last year and audiences returned, the Philharmonic’s fiscal outlook brightened. Ticket sales in the 2021-22 season have been better than expected: Attendance at subscription concerts was 90 percent, though the orchestra was playing in smaller halls with Geffen being renovated. Donations have been strong, rising by 11 percent to $31.5 million in 2020, the last year for which data is available. The Philharmonic also received grants and loans of more than $16 million from the federal government.In October, the Philharmonic began making payments to musicians to offset the pay cuts. But it was not until Monday that the orchestra vowed to fully restore musicians’ pay for the remainder of the contract.The trombonist Colin Williams, the head of the players’ negotiating committee, said the decision would help reassure musicians who have grappled with the uncertainties of the pandemic.“We’re feeling much more confident about our institution again — our place in it and our place in the city,” he said in an interview. “We somehow weathered this incredibly traumatic time and have come out of it stronger and more cohesive than we were before.”Borda said the Philharmonic still faced financial risks, including the possible emergence of new variants of the coronavirus. While the orchestra remains in what she called “a state of suspended fluidity,” she said it was important to stay focused on the future, including the opening of Geffen Hall, which she described as “light at the end of the tunnel.”“We improvise, we move forward,” she said. “We are placing our money on the fact that we are moving ahead.” More

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      Artists Are Putting Their Stamp on Lincoln Center

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      In a partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, works by Nina Chanel Abney and Jacolby Satterwhite will help reintroduce Geffen Hall this fall.When David Geffen Hall reopens on the Lincoln Center campus this fall, two new artworks — by Nina Chanel Abney and by Jacolby Satterwhite — will be splayed across the 65th Street facade and a 50-foot media wall in the renovated lobby.These highly visible pieces, commissioned by the performing arts center in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, are positioned to help reintroduce the longtime home of the New York Philharmonic to the city and will inaugurate a rotating program of visual artists invited to put their stamp on Lincoln Center.“One of the overriding goals of the new David Geffen Hall has been to find ways to connect more meaningfully with outside — not just to open up but to reach out,” said Henry Timms, president and chief executive of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “We’ve been very intentional about thinking about different voices, different audiences, more people seeing themselves at Lincoln Center. The Studio Museum was the perfect partner for that.”For the museum, which has been organizing temporary installations of public art since 2016 in Harlem while its 125th Street building is under construction, this collaboration was “a great opportunity to extend our engagement in site-specific commissioned artwork,” said Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s director and chief curator. It also allows the museum to complement the work at Lincoln Center “to broaden and deepen and expand their program and the ways in which they engage audiences.” Golden pulled in the Public Art Fund for the organization’s resources and expertise in implementing large-scale public projects.Together, the institutions developed the curatorial vision and identified the two prominent locations for the art — a 10,000-square-foot expanse on the north facade of the building and a new multiuse media wall running across the lobby. This space has been reconceived as a kind of living room, open to the public all day with beverages. Nonticketholders will be able to view the art on the media wall that will also broadcast the Philharmonic down to the lobby when it is playing upstairs. Abney, 39, known for her bold, large-scale paintings, and Satterwhite, 36, a multidisciplinary artist who combines digital media and painting, were selected from more than half a dozen artists of color invited to make site-specific proposals.A rendering of a multiuse media wall that will be at David Geffen Hall. Satterwhite’s commission will appear there, and concerts will be streamed, as well.via DBOX“That facade for so long was thought of as the blank back side of the building and is kind of hiding in plain sight,” said Nicholas Baume, artistic and executive director of the Public Art Fund. “It’s right there at that intersection of all these major streets and can express this concept that Lincoln Center wants to open itself up to the city and address some of that symbolic citadel-like podium elevation of the original ensemble of buildings.”In a dynamic constellation of colorful stylized figures, symbols and patterns to be printed on vinyl and applied across a grid of 35 windows on that north facade, Abney will pay homage to San Juan Hill, a largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was demolished to make way for the 14-acre federally aided Lincoln Center project, which broke ground in 1959.“I was interested to delve into the history and the amazing people who inhabited that neighborhood,” said Abney, who is working with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to study San Juan Hill, considered the birthplace of the Charleston and bebop, and home to musicians including the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. “It’s acknowledgment and celebrating what was there.”In tandem, Lincoln Center has commissioned the composer Etienne Charles to explore the neighborhood’s legacy in a piece, “San Juan Hill,” to be performed by the Philharmonic in the new hall for free on Oct. 8.“This is part of a necessary engagement with our history,” Timms said. “This isn’t a one-off.”In a poetic, digitally animated landscape that will unfold across the 50-foot media wall in the lobby, Satterwhite plans to tell a story about the past, present and future of the New York Philharmonic. “The history of Lincoln Center is very male and white — that’s what it’s perceived as,” Satterwhite said. He is working with archivists there to mine footage of conductors and performers of different races and genders working more at the margins of the Philharmonic, to be woven fluidly into a kind of pastoral concert with 100 student musicians and dancers from Alvin Ailey, LaGuardia High School and others that Satterwhite is filming.“I want to reanimate the timeline that may traditionally be told, without any kind of hierarchy,” Satterwhite said. The pandemic, he feels, has offered an opportunity for “culture and society to reconfigure and reflect on itself. I want this piece to be very much about moving forward.” More

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      The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare

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      The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More

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      Geffen Hall’s $550 Million Makeover Is Fully Funded

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      The New York Philharmonic’s home will reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic.Gone are the mustard-colored seats and shoe box interior of David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center. When the hall reopens this fall, wavy beech wood will wrap around the stage — and so will the audience, in seats upholstered in richly colored patterns evoking flower petals in motion.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, paralyzing the performing arts, the orchestra and center seized on the long shutdown to accelerate a planned makeover of Geffen Hall, gutting its main theater and reimagining its public spaces.Now the long-delayed overhaul is almost complete. The project’s leaders announced on Wednesday that they had raised their goal of $550 million to cover the cost of the renovation, and that the hall will reopen to the public in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a rendering of the new hall, wavy beech wood wraps around the stage of the new hall — as does the audience.Diamond Schmitt“It’s not just a simple renovation where we repainted the walls and put down new carpet and chairs,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “The whole space is transformed. It’s an entirely new hall and an entirely new feeling.”With 2,200 seats (down from 2,738 in the old hall), Geffen will have a more intimate feel — and, if all goes as planned, improved acoustics. The project’s leaders hope the renovated hall will help galvanize New York’s performing arts scene during a difficult time, as cultural institutions work to recover from the coronavirus and win back audiences.The pandemic cost the Philharmonic more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue; in the early days of the crisis, it was forced to reduce its staff of 135 by 40 percent, though many have since been rehired. The orchestra is currently in the midst of a roving season during the construction, shuttling mostly between Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center; it is also on the hunt for a replacement for its music director, Jaap van Zweden, who announced in September that he would step down in 2024.The coronavirus pushed the Philharmonic and the center to think more urgently about attracting new audiences, a challenge that orchestras have been grappling with for decades. The hall will include a variety of spaces meant to draw people in. In the lobby, there will be a 50-foot digital screen broadcasting concerts live. A new studio facing Broadway, with floor-to-ceiling windows, will offer passers-by a glimpse of performances, rehearsals and other events.The seats in the new hall will be upholstered in richly colored patterns evoking flower petals in motion.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“We’re opening ourselves up to New York so it doesn’t feel like a fortress,” Borda said. “It feels welcoming, inviting and vibrant.”The renovation of the hall — which opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall and was called Avery Fisher Hall starting in 1976 — has been in the works for decades, repeatedly stalled by management woes and concerns about losing subscribers if the orchestra was exiled from its home for a prolonged period.A $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen revived the project in 2015. Since then, the orchestra and center have raised an additional $450 million, though other naming gifts have not yet been announced.The pandemic, which forced the hall to close in March 2020, offered a silver lining, giving the orchestra and the center a chance to accelerate the construction. They worked at breakneck speed, gutting the interior of the main theater, removing the box office and relocating the escalators.Turmoil in the global supply chain made it harder to obtain some building materials. Surges in coronavirus cases also presented safety challenges at the construction site. But the project pushed forward, even as live performances in the city came to a standstill.“It has become a real celebration of the resilience and creativity and diversity of our great city,” Henry Timms, the president of Lincoln Center, said in an interview.The renovation project pushed forward, even as live performances in the city came to a standstill.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms added that there was still work ahead, including bringing the seats into the hall and painting the interior. The orchestra will begin playing in the space in August as part of an acoustic tuning process that is expected to last several weeks.“No one is declaring this a triumph yet,” Timms said. “We’re not done yet.”The acoustics of the hall, long derided by musicians and critics, have been a priority. The renovated space features beech wood walls molded into grooves to help improve resonance. Seats will wrap around the stage, which has been moved forward 25 feet, providing a greater sense of intimacy.The hall’s notoriously congested lobbies and other public spaces have been reimagined by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which in 2019 joined a team that already included Diamond Schmitt Architects, which is working on the auditorium’s interior; Akustiks, an acoustical design firm; and Fisher Dachs Associates, a theater design firm.The lobby has nearly doubled in size and will include a lounge, a bar and a restaurant.The project’s leaders said the renovation has provided substantial benefits to the city’s economy, which has lagged behind the rest of the United States in its recovery. More than 6,000 jobs have been created, according to the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center; many have gone to businesses run by women or members of racial or ethnic minorities.“We built through the pandemic because we knew New Yorkers needed jobs as much as they needed culture,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said in a statement.The leaders of the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center announced the funding of the hall at a news conference on Wednesday, joined by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams. Adams said the project was a symbol of New York’s comeback amid the pandemic, drawing comparisons to the construction of the Empire State Building during the Great Depression.“We’re going to come back bigger and better than ever,” he said.Borda — who was hired as the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive in 2017, after leading it in the 1990s, in large part because of her success completing the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003 — said the renovation was long overdue. She added that the project had given the Philharmonic’s staff and players a sense of hope during the difficult moments of the pandemic, when dozens of concerts were canceled and pay cuts were imposed.“It’s emblematic of New York: real resilience and hanging in there,” she said. “It’s the reason I came back. I’ve always believed in this project.” More

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      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

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      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

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      Renovating Its Hall, New York Philharmonic Plans a Roving Season

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      With David Geffen Hall under construction, the orchestra will spend most of 2021-22 at two other Lincoln Center venues.For any major music ensemble, planning a season of concerts as a pandemic stretches on is daunting. For the New York Philharmonic, there is an added challenge: The orchestra’s home, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, is in the midst of a $550 million renovation.That will leave the orchestra roving for the next year as it tries to recover from the pandemic, which resulted in the cancellation of its 2020-21 season and the loss of more than $21 million in ticket revenue, forcing painful budget cuts.But the Philharmonic won’t travel too far. On Tuesday, it announced its 2021-22 season: a slate of about 80 concerts, compared to 120 in a normal year, spent mostly at two other Lincoln Center venues, Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater, with four forays to Carnegie Hall and a holiday run of “Messiah” at Riverside Church.“People are starved for live entertainment,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “There may be some slight hesitancy at the beginning, but I think people are going to come flocking back.”The season opens Sept. 17 with the pianist Daniil Trifonov playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at Tully. Other prominent artists on the schedule include the pianists Yuja Wang and Leif Ove Andsnes; the violinists Hilary Hahn and Joshua Bell; the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who will play a concerto by John Adams; and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will lead Schumann’s four symphonies and two world premieres over two weeks in March. The Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill, will be featured in Anthony Davis’s “You Have the Right to Remain Silent.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who will play Dvorak’s concerto and also participate in a Young People’s Concert; the soprano Golda Schultz; the pianist Beatrice Rana; and the conductors Jeannette Sorrell and Dalia Stasevska.In its fourth year with the conductor Jaap van Zweden as its music director, the Philharmonic will also premiere a variety of works, including by the American composers Joan Tower and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Those two premieres are part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote.A few of the concerts will be at an unusual time: The orchestra will present three Sunday matinees, the first time it has done that since the 1960s, in an effort to broaden its audience.The Philharmonic has been at the center of the recent revival of the arts in New York. The orchestra appeared at the Shed in April, its first indoor concert in 13 months. And it performed at Bryant Park last week, the first time its musicians had played together without masks since the start of the pandemic.The orchestra is taking precautions in its planning to ease fears about the virus. There will be no intermissions at least through December, to prevent crowds from gathering. Borda said the orchestra would follow guidance from the state and federal authorities in deciding other public health measures, like requiring masks or proof of vaccination.“What it will be like in September is anybody’s guess,” Borda said. “We have to remain flexible.”The Philharmonic had to make a series of painful cuts as more than 100 of its concerts were canceled. The orchestra reduced its administrative staff by about 40 percent, largely through layoffs. In December, its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included a 25 percent cut to the players’ base pay through August 2023, with compensation gradually increasing after that, though remaining below prepandemic levels.There were some bright spots amid the turmoil. Donations increased 11 percent last year, totaling $31.5 million. The orchestra also worked to deepen its connections with city residents through two series of Bandwagon concerts, bringing first a pickup truck and then a 20-foot shipping container with a foldout stage to neighborhoods across the city, and giving local artists an opportunity to perform.Several of the organizations that took part in Bandwagon concerts, including National Black Theater, a nonprofit arts group in Harlem, and El Puente, a social justice organization in Brooklyn, will be featured in the 2021-22 season. Those collaborations will be organized by Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor who produced the Bandwagon series and is also the orchestra’s artist-in-residence next season; he has also helped prepare a two-week festival focusing on identity, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within.”The coming season will be the first time in recent decades that the orchestra has not had access to its own hall. Its administration and Lincoln Center decided to use the shutdown to accelerate the renovation of Geffen Hall, which is set to reopen in the fall of 2022, a year and a half earlier than planned. The hall will feature state-of-the-art acoustics and a more intimate feel, with seats that wrap around the stage.Borda said much of the coming season would be devoted to preparing for the orchestra’s return to Geffen.“This hall provides an opportunity to transform ourselves,” she said, “but also to paint on an even larger palette.” More