23 May 2026
Welcome to the fourth in our series on a tour around some of Europe’s greatest concert venues. This post contains more images than usual, as a major part of a visit to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg is the hall’s architecture and design. The building sits on top of an old brick warehouse in the port of Hamburg.
The view of the building from outside is spectacular, but seeing it at a distance from the larger of Hamburg’s inner-city lakes, the Außenalster (the Outer Alster), takes your breath away. The building is so high that its sweeping roof can be seen next to two of the most historic buildings in the city, Hamburg Town Hall and St. Nicholas Memorial. The roofline has been variously described as a hoisted sail, a wave of water, an iceberg, or a quartz crystal. The first two descriptions seem more apt, bearing in mind the Port of Hamburg’s maritime history, although ice floes on the river Elbe have been known to create mini-icebergs in extremely cold weather.
The ice theme continued as we entered the hall, even though it was a warm evening. A journey into the hall feels like taking an escalator up the inside of a glacier, with white walls and a ceiling carved as if from ice. Apparently, it’s Europe’s longest curved escalator, and it takes two and a half minutes to get to the top.
We arrived at the Plaza, from which the lower parts of the Grosser Saal (the main hall) and the Kleiner Saal (the recital room for chamber concerts and jazz) can be reached. From the Plaza, there are spectacular 360-degree views of the city and the harbour.
The interior of the hall is designed on the ‘vineyard’ principle, the same acoustic design used in the DR Konserthuset, the subject of our last post. The Swiss architectural practice Herzog & de Meuron, based in Basel, Switzerland, wrote,
The client specifies that the main auditorium should provide an alternative to the conventional shoe-box concert hall, which Hamburg already has in the Laeiszhalle
This sets the hall apart from the shoe-box design used in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the first stop on our tour. The Elbphilharmonie breaks up the auditorium into several small ‘vineyards’, so that each part of the audience feels small and intimate, even though the hall holds over 2,000 people. Intriguingly, the smaller recital hall uses the shoe-box shape, so it could be argued that the Elbphilharmonie provides the best of both acoustic worlds, although we didn’t get a chance to visit the Kleiner Saal. Both halls are set apart from the noise of the outside world,
The Elbphilharmonie’s architecture cleverly tricks the surrounding noise of ships’ propellers, sirens and all kinds of other dockland sounds.
The outer wall of the concert hall is attached to the rest of the building, but the inner structure is acoustically isolated from the outer walls and supported on 362 springs. The same design is used at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, which uses 260 springs to isolate it from traffic and the Metrolink tram outside.
So what does the Great Hall in the Elbphilharmonie sound like? Our seats were in the very front row of the Stalls, on the far right, so we were very close to the stage but off to one side. As the hall’s own website says (in relation to the seats that are behind the stage),
Depending on which section of the orchestra you are sitting closest to, the horns or double basses, the brass or the percussion come out more strongly than in the seats in front of the stage. Higher up in the hall, the sound produces a more balanced overall impression.
So, from our seats, the lower brass instruments were more prominent than the rest of the massive orchestra during the final piece, Hans Werner Henze’s Symphony Number Seven. But in the opening piece, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, with a smaller orchestra, the violins had a lovely bloom, and the woodwind sailed above them, creating an ideal sound. The playing of the Elbphilharmonie orchestra under the German conductor Matthias Pintscher was sublime. In the second piece, Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto, the Greek soloist Leonidas Kavakos’ sound was warm and passionate, ideally balanced with the orchestra. His playing in the cadenza, with its earthy, folky feel, was astonishing.
Henze’s Seventh Symphony is a challenge for both audience and orchestra. The composer states somewhat cryptically in his notes that it’s ‘a German symphony, and it deals with matters German.’ It’s partly inspired by the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, whose work and time spent in an asylum lie behind the finale and the scherzo. But as the Gramophone critic wrote, ‘what lies behind the intense and complex threnody of the towering second – and longest – movement is not divulged.’
The symphony felt immensely complex, dense, and virtuosic; both players and the conductor had to work very hard. From our seats, we could see a young percussionist counting furiously to himself and a pianist and a celesta player playing intensely and with great rhythmic precision. We were very close to a young tuba player, who inserted a huge wooden mute, played three notes, and set the mute down on the stage next to him. It was fascinating to have such an intimate view of orchestral players who are usually a long way from us.
So far on our tour, we have visited two vineyards and one shoebox. So, which type of concert hall offers better acoustics? As the Elbphilharmonie website says,
‘There is not a conclusive answer to this question.’
Sources:
https://www.herzogdemeuron.com
https://www.elbphilharmonie.de/en
Now read on…