Thursday 7 May 2026
It’s said that in London, you are never more than six feet away from a rat. In Amsterdam, you are never more than six feet away from a bicycle. On Thursday evening, a smartly dressed woman, in full dress suit and colourful shawl, carefully parked her bicycle and crossed the road to enter the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. This would be an unusual sight in other European cities, but in Amsterdam, nobody appeared to notice.
I have always wanted to go to the Concertgebouw, ever since, as a young teenager, I heard Paul McCartney singing,
If there’s a rock show at the Concertgebouw
You’ve got long hair at the Madison Square
You’ve got rock’n’roll at the Hollywood Bowl…
‘Rock Show’ from Venus and Mars (1975) by Paul McCartney and Wings
On Thursday, rather than a rock show, we went to see more traditional orchestral fare: the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann, performing music by Brahms and Tchaikovsky, whose names are written on the walls and balconies of the hall. The name Wagenaar was also there. I assumed this was a Dutch spelling of Wagner, but it turns out this was the Dutch composer Johannes Wagenaar (1862-1941). In January 1917, the composer conducted the orchestra in a concert of his own works and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, performed recently in Manchester by the BBC Philharmonic.The critic Matthijs Vermeulen, in a damning review, despite acknowledging that the composer was an ‘extraordinarily gifted man wrote
‘Wagenaar made the mistake of most ordinary conductors: he indicates too much. With a virtuoso ensemble like the Concertgebouw Orchestra, one may imagine that it knows most of the entrances of a frequently performed symphony, such as the Fantastique, by heart, or that they can at least be sufficiently imprinted on memory through a rehearsal.’
On Thursday, the lady didn’t protest too much: Stutzmann conducted with great precision and restrained gestures, bringing out the best in this world-class orchestra. She did, however, make a grand entrance. The conductor and any soloists have to enter down a long staircase, rather than from the side of the stage which is more common.
We began with a short amuse-bouche, Glinka’s ‘Overture’ to his opera Ruslan and Lyudmila (1837 – 1842). But the main event in the first half of the concert was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with the soloist Augustin Hadelich, who we heard in Manchester playing Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto. It was fascinating to compare his performance with that of the South Korean violinist Bomsori, who played the concerto in Manchester a week ago. Both violinists were superb: Bomsori’s violin sounded like a lyric soprano, whereas Hadelich’s was more like a warm, robust mezzo, with a legato of which any opera singer would have been proud. He deservedly drew rapturous applause and a standing ovation from the capacity audience. His encore was a cheeky bluegrass number from his American Bluegrass album, which provoked indulgent smiles from the audience and some members of the orchestra.
Time for the interval, and a free drink, also a chance to gaze across a huge expanse of grass from the hall’s windows to the Rijksmuseum. These two monuments to civic pride were opened within three years of each other in the late 19th century. The Concertgebouw is known for its remarkable acoustics – along with the Musikverein in Vienna, it is considered one of the best in the world, simply by virtue of its shoebox shape. This was probably more by accident than design – the science of acoustics began in the 20th century with experts like the American Leo Beranek, who wrote one of the standard textbooks on concert hall acoustics, Music, Acoustics and Architecture, in 1962. Dr. Peter D’Antonio of RPG Diffusor Systems, Inc and Prof Trevor Cox of the University of Salford said in a paper delivered to the 156th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in 2008 that another accident of design in older concert halls is that they have good sound diffusion compared to many modern halls,
An enduring characteristic of classic architecture is the beautiful statuary, relief ornamentation, columns and coffered ceilings. These beautiful features, coincidentally also provided useful sound scattering and excellent acoustics
The second half was an opportunity to hear the orchestra in the hall’s magnificent acoustics. I have spent many happy hours since my teenage years when I first subscribed to HiFi Answers, reading about Hi-Fi equipment, going to shows to listen to Hi-Fi equipment, and most importantly, listening to Hi-Fi equipment. Most recently, I treated myself to a pair of Sennheiser HD800S Open-back headphones and an Astell&Kern SR35 portable HD music player. I bought this system because it sounded musical, warm, detailed and spacious. The hall sounded exactly like this. In the Brahms symphony, I heard details I have never heard before, even in the finest recordings. Each instrument was surrounded by a lovely bloom, but there was great clarity as well. Plucked instruments were perfectly defined, and the double basses, physically towering above the cellos on the steps above, could be heard clearly rather than getting lost as they often are in other, lesser halls. Orchestral soloists all stood out; with lesser orchestras, this could have been a problem, but with an orchestra of this quality, the concert was an absolute joy.
Next stop, DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen!
Sources:
Dr. Peter D’Antonio and Prof Trevor Cox Acoustical Optimization of Modern Architectural Spaces (156th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008)