The Concertgebouw

In the room

The experience

The Concertgebouw opened on 11 April 1888 with an orchestra of 120 and a choir of 500, south of the old city, on the ground that became the Museumplein. Adolf Leonard van Gendt had looked hard at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, two years older, and built a plain rectangular box, 44 metres long, 28 wide and 17 high, seating 1,974. Nobody then could calculate what that box would do. It turned out to do everything. The reverberation is 2.8 seconds empty and 2.2 seconds with an audience in, long enough for Bruckner to bloom and short enough for a string quartet to stay clear, and the Main Hall has been one of the three reference halls of the world ever since.

The resident orchestra gave its first concert here on 3 November 1888 and became Royal on its hundredth birthday. Around the balcony and walls run the surnames of 46 composers, Bach to Stravinsky, so the hall reads like a programme. Behind the stage sits the 1890 Maarschalkerweerd organ, 60 stops, rebuilt by Flentrop between 1990 and 1993. The oval Recital Hall next door seats 437 and is where the chamber music and the lunch concerts happen.

In 1983 the whole thing was found to be sinking into the Amsterdam mud. Between July 1985 and April 1988 the 2,186 rotting wooden piles were swapped for concrete while concerts carried on above, and Pi de Bruijn added the glass entrance on the Museumplein side. Some 900 concerts and events a year now bring in more than 700,000 people.