A musical vision at Dortmund's Konzerthaus

Apr 2 2010 By Christopher Morley

Dortmund’s concert hall is the catalyst for inspiring perfomances and the rebirth of an area. Christopher Morley stepped inside.

The Konzerthaus in the German Ruhrland city of Dortmund may not be quite as visually impressive as Symphony Hall, nor as capacious (1,500 as opposed to Birmingham’s 2,200), but it does have an excellent acoustic, and, like Symphony Hall, proudly boasts a Klais-built organ.

And its audiences know their music. At the end of last Monday’s concert from the CBSO there was a standing ovation from everyone (myself included), with a huge reluctance to let the orchestra go after a programme of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

This was the penultimate concert of the CBSO’s gruelling, near fortnight-long German tour, during which glowing accolades had been garnered in every city, but there was no sense of jadedness, no sense of “here we are again, we’ll be home soon”.

The music-making fizzed with electricity, soloist Baiba Skride and conductor Andris Nelsons took immense risks in the concerto (they all came off, and the smile from Skride to Nelsons as they turned the final hairpin corner said it all), and the symphony was just an exhilarating helter-skelter ride, high on adrenaline.

At the end of this breathtaking performance a bouquet was brought on for Nelsons. Immediately he clambered through the orchestra to bestow it upon Elspeth Dutch, her lengthy second movement horn solo so beautiful, and one which she’d had to nerve herself to deliver already several times during the tour.

There were accolades from Nelsons for many other orchestral performers. Until he turned to acknowledge the tumultuous audience applause, concertmaster Laurence Jackson smilingly refusing the conductor’s indication that the orchestra should rise to join in the ovation three times, until at last the entire CBSO family stood and received this well-deserved accolade. I felt so proud to be part of it..

Dortmund’s hall was opened in the early years of this century, part of a scheme to revitalise and regenerate a comparatively run-down area of the city centre. Everyone there, including local journalists, were anxious to hear what effect the opening of Symphony Hall a decade earlier had on Birmingham, and I was pleased to be able to describe what a catalyst it has been on the growth and rebirth of the surrounding area.

The environments are not similar. Dortmund’s Konzerthaus is tucked away in the middle of a maze of side-streets lined with cheap boutiques (if you weren’t looking for it you’d walk past it), whereas Symphony Hall sits proudly between what was once an elegant Centenary Square (now a pedestrian-unfriendly building-site) and the born-again canals. But the effect is the same: a world-class concert-hall drawing people of all ages, classes and artistic experience to an area of the city which would otherwise be neglected. Close to the Konzerthaus in Dortmund is the Centre for Orchestral Studies (Orchesterzentrum/NRW), a spanking new building opened only last year, with an array of rehearsal rooms, practice and administrative rooms which simply take the breath away in their ambience, thoughtful provision (mirrors, for example, to emphasise posture, and plenty of chairs and music-stands) and general sense of purpose.

The idea behind the scheme is that music graduates from four surrounding universities (Cologne, Detmold, Dusseldorf and Essen) should gain top-level experience playing in rehearsal, and indeed performance, with top-class professional orchestras visiting Dortmund in long-term residencies.