Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician behind the new Elbphilharmonie in Germany and Disney Hall in L. A., forever changed the concert hall. We revisit his first landmark project, Suntory, which turns 30.
It all started in a city with a taste for single malt whiskey and classical music — and an obliging beverage company. Suntory Hall opened here 30 years ago, transforming the musical — and to some extent city — life of Tokyo and leading to a concert hall building boom that extended throughout Japan and eventually the world.
Suntory, tucked away in a fancy shopping complex, makes no statement on the street, as you might expect from its corporate benefactor. The statement was left to a young acoustician named Yasuhisa Toyota, who put the listener in the middle of the music. This was Toyota’s, and Japan’s, first vineyard-style hall.
Conservative Japanese audiences were quick to complain. A hall layout where neither the listener nor the musician has any place to hide visually or audibly was a bit too in your face. But Suntory had the blessing of the conductor the Japanese most admired. The Berlin Philharmonic’s music director, Herbert von Karajan, had overseen the construction of his own early vineyard-style concert hall, the celebrated 1963 Philharmonie.
Tokyo was already Asia’s classical music capital, with a couple of decent and not-so-decent halls, but music felt newly alive in Suntory. Once the hall began presenting all the great names and ensembles in classical music — more year in and year out than any other venue, Carnegie Hall included — greater Tokyo couldn’t help but notice. Over the next two decades, dozens of concert halls, big and small, were built throughout the country, many driven by Toyota.
These days, the shiny new halls in America and Europe, beginning with what may still be Toyota’s greatest masterpiece, the vineyard-style Walt Disney Concert Hall, get the attention. Toyota’s first Berlin venue, the Frank Gehry-designed Pierre Boulez Saal, is debuting. In California, we boast Toyota acoustics in, along with Disney and REDCAT, four outstanding college concert halls (at Stanford, USC, Chapman in Orange and Soka in Aliso Viejo).
Over the last year, I’ve visited several of Toyota’s halls in Japan to sense the effect they’ve had on the musical and, perhaps, civic life of their communities.
Suntory, which has just closed for maintenance after celebrating its 30th anniversary season, remains far and away the most prestigious concert address in the East, no matter the architecturally stunning opera houses and concert halls popping up in China, Indonesia, the Emirates and the Southern Caucasus.
