14 February
At Play in Carnegie Hall in New York
Growing up, I always heard about entertainers yearning to play Carnegie Hall in New York City. All the variety shows and talk shows made it seem like the pinnacle of success, just like the song lyric that claims if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, and so on. But what exactly is this Hall? Who was Carnegie? With a little bit of research, it’s easy to find out:
Andrew Carnegie was Scottish-American and an industrialist, bridging the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. He came to the United States with his parents when he was a kid and his first job was messenger boy. He moved up the ranks of the telegraph company, but found his fortune when he built Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Steel Company, later merging to become the Federal Steel Company. He became a philanthropist after that, funding a number of institutions with his name on it: the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, as well as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In all this funding, part of it went to establish and build Carnegie Hall.
The main hall at Carnegie, now known as the Isaac Stern Auditorium/Ronald O. Perelman Stage, opened in 1891, nearly a hundred and twenty years ago. It’s been the site of concerts, lectures, jazz events, and more. The stage was originally designed by an architect cellist named William Burnett Tuthill; renovations occurred in 1986, and the Hall holds as many as two thousand eight hundred and four people. It’s famed for its acoustics where the hall becomes an instrument in and of its, enlarging whatever the performer does.
There are two other halls in Carnegie Hall, the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Recital Hall and the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall. The former seats 268 people and is used for chamber music, recitals, discussions, master classes, and so on. Originally, the hall was known as the Chamber Music Hall. The latter hall seats around 599 people. Originally, in 1895, the Hall was rented out to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and used as a theater for decades, until it was turned into a cinema in the 1960s. At the end of the last century, in 1997, work began to turn it into a space that could be used for a variety of purposes.
It’s clear why Carnegie Hall is so renowned. I can’t hope to play there, but perhaps one day I can be a patron and see some of the work performed. I can imagine an ideal situation of coming to one of the boutique hotels one can find in New York and spending a few nights at concerts and theaters. It seems the elegance of the boutique hotel experience and the Carnegie Hall might be a great match.
Related posts:
