Symphony Hall (Birmingham)
The Symphony Hall is a concert hall with 2,262 seats in Birmingham , England . It was opened on April 15, 1991 and officially inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II in June 1991. Symphony Hall is the seat of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and hosts around 270 events per year. The concert hall cost £ 30 million to build. The interior of the concert hall was modeled on the Musikverein in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam .
The venue presents itself with a program of jazz, world music, folk, rock, pop, classical and organ concerts, spoken word, dance, comedy, educational and public events and, as part of the International Convention Center, is also used for conferences and corporate events .
Design and equipment
Symphony Hall was designed and built by Percy Thomas Partnership and Renton Howard Wood Levin (who together founded the Convention Center Partnership for the International Convention Center). They received special support from Russell Johnson of Artec Consultants Inc. A particularly innovative feature of the Symphony Hall is its acoustic adaptability. It has a reverberation chamber that extends backstage and high along the sides. This means that the space can be increased or decreased by 50% if the doors are automatically opened or closed. The U-shaped reverberation chamber has a volume of 12,700 cubic meters. There is an acoustic canopy that can be raised or lowered above the stage. Damping panels can be extended or retracted. All of this to ensure that the sound of the room is perfectly matched to the volume and style of the music being played. All walls and the ceiling are 200 millimeters thick and made of concrete.
The Symphony Hall is only 30 meters away from a covered railway line. In order to prevent the transmission of vibrations, the concert hall was mounted on rubber cushions, as was the railway line. The hall is also shielded from the heavy traffic on Broad Street by a double facade made of concrete. Large, low-speed air duct systems reduce ventilation noise.
In 2001 an organ with 6000 organ pipes was installed, which was designed and built by the Johannes Klais Orgelbau company in Bonn and which is specially tailored to the reverberation chamber of the building. The organ is the largest mechanical organ in Great Britain. The instrument has 82 registers distributed over four manuals and pedal. The organ is equipped with a mechanical key action and an electrical key action .
Operated by the management company Performances Birmingham Limited, Symphony Hall is a not-for-profit organization and runs a range of projects for schools, groups and families through an education and public relations department. In total, she works with around 12,000 young people and 6,000 adults each year.
Web links
- Official website
- Birmingham / GB, Symphony Hall - Second construction phase completed at orgelbau.klais.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Taylor Charles: Exploring Music: The Science and Technology of Tones and Tunes: Science of Tones and Tunes . CRC Press, 1992, ISBN 0-7503-0213-5 , pp. 232-234 .
- ^ John Tribe: Economics of Leisure and Tourism . Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, ISBN 0-7506-4232-7 .
- ^ Sallie Westwood, John Williams: Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories . Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0-415-14429-9 .
- ↑ Alec Nisbett: The Sound Studio: Audio Techniques for Radio, Television, Film and Recording . Focal Press, 2003, ISBN 0-240-51911-6 , pp. 50 .
- ^ The Symphony Organ. ( Memento of March 26, 2016 on the Internet Archive ) Symphony Hall, Birmingham
- ^ Performances Birmingham - charitable managing organization ( Memento from March 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive )