“New York’s Cultural Renaissance: The City Transformed After the Pandemic”

LETTER FROM NEW YORK

Suddenly, the obvious appeared: after the two years of glaciation due to Covid-19, New York has changed. The city has undergone a cultural change that deserves to be revisited, even if the fall of the euro has increased the bill by 20%, not to mention inflation.

First, there was this paradoxical opportunity, the forced closure of the New York Philharmonic. Instead of lamenting, the executives of David Geffen Hall, one of the Lincoln Center buildings, jumped at the chance and renovated the music room, whose acoustics once resembled those of a train station hall. , especially when one had the imprudence to listen to a Mahler symphony. The project was constantly postponed, for lack of an extra room to house the Philharmonie. The Covid-19 reduced her to silence and blew up these attentions. The budget of 600 million dollars (about 608 million euros) was not even consumed, the site having been launched at the height of the depression, before inflation went to wreak havoc on the cost of materials raw.

The inauguration took place on October 8 in a wooded hall, with reduced capacity (2,158 seats instead of 2,728 seats). To improve the acoustics, the stage has been moved forward by 8 meters, as chef Pierre Boulez had tinkered with it in the 1970s, the reception rooms have been opened up to the city, and it’s superb.

At the premiere, spectators defied the instruction to put on a mask, signifying the end of the pandemic. They listened to the world premiere of San Juan Hill : A New York Story, by African-American Etienne Charles under the direction of Dutch chef Jaap van Zweden. The work, which mixes a jazz orchestra with the symphony orchestra, traces the fate of families displaced during the construction of Lincoln Center in the late 1950s. This is where it takes place West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein’s musical. This feeling of guilt is a bit paradoxical – the composer celebrates the inauguration of the new hall by castigating what once allowed its construction – but we are in tune with the times.

Black is the new color

If New York was marked from 2017 by the #metoo movement, with the big cleaning in the media (the interviewer Charlie Rose), the culture (the chef James Levine) and the cinema (Woody Allen, pariah in his city ), she has been inspired by Black Lives Matter since the May 2020 killing in Minneapolis of African-American George Floyd by a white police officer.

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