Elbphilharmonie Hamburg – The Acoustic Marvel, Privately Experienced

The Building: Herzog & de Meuron on Kaispeicher B

The Elbphilharmonie stands on the historic Kaispeicher B – a brick warehouse built in 1963 in Hamburg's harbour basin, which stored cocoa, coffee and tea until the 1990s. The Basel architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron won the 2003 competition with a design that did not demolish the old brick building but left it in place: the glass high-rise with its wave-shaped silhouette grows organically out of the old warehouse.

37 storeys, 110 metres high, 1,000 individually shaped curved glass facade elements: the building is harder to construct than it looks – and it already looks very hard to build. Construction ran from 2007 to 2016 – nine years instead of the planned four, at a cost of 866 million euros rather than the originally planned 77 million. The cost explosion became a Hamburg political scandal; the success of the finished building has silenced the debate.

The Grand Hall: Acoustics as Art

The centrepiece of the Elbphilharmonie is the Grand Hall, with 2,100 seats and acoustics designed by Yasuhisa Toyota – the acoustic designer also responsible for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Toyota's concept for Hamburg: the White Hall is structured like a "vineyard," with the orchestra at the centre and the audience arranged in tiers around it. Every one of the 2,100 seats is within a maximum of 30 metres from the stage.

The interior cladding of the hall consists of 10,000 individually shaped gypsum fibre panels, calculated so that sound finds no parallel surfaces and therefore no unwanted resonances. The result is an acoustic that astonishes even connoisseurs: dry, direct, transparent and yet warm.

The Plaza: Hamburg from Above

The publicly accessible Plaza at 37 metres height – between the old warehouse and the new glass tower – is Hamburg's finest free viewing platform. The panorama across the Elbe, HafenCity, Speicherstadt, Alster and the city centre reveals Hamburg's geography at a glance. On a clear day the view extends into Schleswig-Holstein.

Concert Programme and Ticket Planning

The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under its chief conductor Alan Gilbert is the resident orchestra; guest conductors and soloists of world standing perform throughout the year. Tickets for popular concerts – especially the major symphony evenings and solo recitals – are often sold out months in advance. We know the programme, track availability and secure the right seats for the right concert. Then we arrange everything else: transport, dinner, accommodation.