Re-opening Night at Alice Tully

I made it over on Sunday to the re-opening night concert at Alice Tully Hall, the 1960s-era chamber music auditorium at Lincoln Center in New York that's been greatly refashioned in all senses of the word by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. I won't pretend to be any judge of acoustics. I'll leave that to people who know what they're talking about. But from a twelth row orchestra seat I could appreciate the way the hall held the liquid vibrato of the lead violin into a silent passage of Beethoven's Grosse Fugue and loved the ear twinkles in Osvaldo Golijov's haunting Mariel, a work from 1999 for cello and marimba, new to me, that sent chills down my spine.

But what interests me most about this project is still what I wrote about in this week's Time — that given enough will, talent and money it's possible to reconfigure an architectural complex from the '60s, the age of the big, aloof-from-everything superblock, to make it connect with the streets around it. The way the reconfigured Tully Hall presents itself to Broadway now is pretty smashing. Who knows, there may even be hope some day for Albany.