Boston Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Andris Nelsons in performance at Symphony Hall. Photo: Boston Symphony Orchestra
“There are many places to hear music in Boston but none are as densely layered with the cultural past, or as palpably connected to the historic soul of the city, as Symphony Hall,” writes Jeremy Eichler in Sunday’s (5/8) Boston Globe. “Even more iconic, for some, than Fenway Park, Symphony Hall is the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops…. It is the symbolic heart of the city’s musical life…. Symphony Hall was the vision of the financier and philanthropist Henry Higginson, who founded the BSO in 1881 [and] in 1892 … bought the land at the corner of what would become Massachusetts and Huntington avenues…. Symphony Hall would become the anchor tenant in the city’s new Cultural Mile [that would include] the Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Conservatory, and the Boston Opera House (of blessed memory)…. The hall [designed by Charles Follen McKim] opened on Oct. 15, 1900…. The acoustics of Symphony Hall, with its almost ideal reverberation times, became the secret ingredient of the BSO’s unforced elegance…. After two-plus years of streaming, Zooming, and singing happy birthday over FaceTime, surely the analog wonders of Symphony Hall have never in its long history sounded so good.”
