Het Concertgebouw

     I arrived very early for the concert and found my assigned seat somewhere in the middle of the hall. I sat quietly in the empty hall, looking up to marvel at the ceiling and the balconies with names of composers inscribed on their sides. The stage had been set up for the concert, and a man was seated at an 18th century piano. He was tuning it. Suddenly, he dropped his tuning wrench on the stage floor and what I heard when it dropped astounded me! I realized that the acoustics in this bulding where perfect beyond anything I could ever have imagined! 
     At the end of the concert, I went to the box office and bought a ticket for each of my remaining nights in the city when there was a concert. I had found my perfect place for listening to music!
     I returned to Amsterdam two years later and this time, I had purchased my tickets months beforehand. My seat in every case was in one of the first four rows and directly in front of the conductor. From this vantage point I heard great classical music in a way that I had never before experienced. Tournemire’s beautiful Poeme Opus 38, still not available on a recording to my knowledge; Scriabin’s wonderful Symphony No. 3, “The Divine Poem”, almost unknown in the USA; Widor’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra; and Chausson’s amazing Poème de l’amour et de la mer, Op. 19. Some of the most wonderful music! I experienced Ravel’s fantastic Alborada del Gracioso in a way that I never had before. With a stereo recording, you are listening to music from two locations. In this concert hall, with its amazing acoustics, you experience very clearly the sounds coming from wherever they are located on the stage. And so, in the Ravel piece, when you heard from several percussion instruments playing at the same time, they sounded unique, not blended into a single sound.
     The ultimate experience of this separation of sound for me was when I listened to the orchestra perform Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. There was a place in the music where two different lines of melody were playing at the same time and they crisscrossed each other. In the CD recording that I had at home the sound when they crossed was blurred. Seated in this amazing concert hall, I could hear the two lines of melody as unique.
     The ultimate experience was on July 5, 2009. I was seated in my favorite place, the third row in the middle, just behind the conductor. Tonight, I would experience Anton Bruckner’s magnificent 4th Symphony, the “Romantic”, conducted by one of Europe’s greatest conductors, Philippe Herreweghe, with the orchestra De Koninklijke Filharmonie van Vlaanderen, or the deFilharmonie, from Antwerp. This became on of my greatest musical experiences. I realized, for one thing, that the brass that in this concert hall would be heard as distinct instruments, on stereo recordings of Bruckner’s symphonies might sound over bearing, as just one single sound, not the instruments combined.