LOOK BACK - Sept. 23, 1962: Opening night at Lincoln Center
The New York Times
September 23, 2022
Sixty years ago tonight, Lincoln Center opened with the first concert at what was then called Philharmonic Hall. The musicians played their instruments. The children of the conductor soon played, too — in the corridors, in the balconies, in their father’s office.
Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie recalled romping in the new building as her father prepared for his “Young People’s Concerts,” which, like the New York Philharmonic’s opening-night performance, were televised. She was 10 years old then. Her brother Alexander was 7.
“My brother and I would accompany our dad” on the day of a telecast, arriving at 7 a.m. for her father’s camera rehearsal, she told me. “Then, by 9 a.m., the orchestra would have drifted in to have their rehearsal,” she said, “and they would set up a big table with coffee and doughnuts. We were so thrilled about the doughnuts. We would steal the doughnuts.”
“While the rehearsal was going on, Alexander and I would run around the hall,” she said. “Nobody supervised us. Nobody told us there was a place we couldn’t go. We knew every nook and cranny, every staff room. We would have races in the corridors.” They called the third balcony “the tippity top.”
Later there would be a dress rehearsal, which she said inevitably ran long — a problem in the every-second-counts world of network television — and was inevitably followed by “an emergency meeting in my father’s office with the production team.”
The grown-ups focused on “poss cuts,” possible cuts in the script. The children focused on cold cuts. “There would be sandwiches,” Jamie Bernstein recalled. “Alexander and I were starving by then. We’d been going hard.”
On the morning after the inaugural concert, The New York Times said it had been a milestone “in its excitement, social prestige and spirit of community welcome.” But what about the sound? Philharmonic Hall had literally been tuned with a bang — the acoustical engineers had fired cannon shots from the stage several months earlier. And on the morning of opening night, The Times’s music critic, Harold C. Schonberg wrote an article that wondered if Philharmonic Hall would be among “the great ones.”
The acoustics were “unsatisfactory and fiercely criticized,” the Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton later wrote. Or, to quote an amusing and acerbic line from an essay by the critic Alan Rich: “I never saw anything like it,’ burbled Jacqueline Kennedy on opening night, when asked about the sound.”
Burton wrote that “Bernstein had the difficult task of privately calling for urgent remedial action but publicly expressing confidence in the Philharmonic’s new home.” Eventually Philharmonic Hall was remodeled and renamed Avery Fisher Hall. It was re-renamed in 2015, becoming David Geffen Hall after a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul. Now it is about to reopen with a new look, fewer seats and what the lead acoustician called “a much better relationship between cubic volume and sound absorption.” As our writer James S. Russell put it: “The New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are betting $550 million that he got the sound right.”