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| New World Center concert hall |
The Frank Gehry-designed home for the New World Symphony in Miami opens Wednesday night, a concert hall that updates the Bauhaus idea of the Total Theater for the Age of the Internet. Flexible, futuristic, multi-purpose and multi-media, it demolishes the boundary between what happens inside the building and the outside world.
If you think that the key to bringing classical music (however we may define it) back to the center of contemporary culture is to stage it in the most exciting way possible, the same way Cirque du Soleil updated the old circus, then this is the $160 million experiment for you. (Cirque's Stefan DeWilde designed the lighting for the new building, in fact.)
Here are a few features:
- A 756-seat main theater, almost in the round, with giant "sails" on which the latest HD videos can be projected.
- A Gehry "jumble" of more than 30 rehearsal and performance studios in which smaller, more informal recitals can be staged.
- A rehearsal hall situated to encourage visitors to the 2.5 acre park outside the building to enter and listen to the music in the making.
- A wall-projection system embedded in that park that will broadcast the work inside onto a 7000-square-foot screen on the facade -- de facto outdoor concerts, produced inside.
- The latest, fastest internet connections to make it possible to create "virtual" concerts with far-flung musicians along with master classes for students around the world. (The New World Symphony is a student orchestra.)
