When you get this book in your hands, you don't start reading right away. Or perhaps you do, but first you read the foreword by Joost Maegerman, director of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra. There's a beautiful sentence in it, and I can't help but quote it: "Every musician has their own instrument, but the concert hall is the instrument of the entire orchestra".Beautiful, isn't it? But the history of this concert hall is presented so attractively and luxuriously that you immediately want to start flipping through and looking at all those photos of the orchestra, the hall, and of course the conductors Elim Chan and Philippe Herreweghe, scattered throughout the entire work. And preceded by a separate photo essay by Michiel Hendryckx with impressions referring to "significant" places from this history. And it's also brimming with prints of historical documents, posters, monuments, portraits, old programs, engravings, all impressively designed, with a ribbon bookmark because you won't read this book in one sitting.
© Vicent Callot
That same word "impressive" can undoubtedly also be used for the nine chapters about 125 years of Elisabeth Hall and about "the city around the hall" and "the hall in the city." Plenty of history, then, from concert life in the 19th century, the Belle Époque, the interwar period, wartime, and today. Lovers of how things were and how they came to be will more than satisfy their curiosity. And this history begins long before what Antwerp residents now know as De Harmonie or the new city information center. It all starts with the founding of the Société Royale d'Harmonie d'Anvers in 1914 and the construction of their new premises in 1846 on the Mechelse steenweg. A selection of Antwerp's musical life in the Belle Époque is brought to life in vivid detail by Jan De Wilde through the many concerts featuring creations by Benoit (The Scheldt, The War, The Rubens Cantata), a Liszt and Wagner festival, and the inauguration of the Flemish Opera. Hedwige Baeck-Schilders describes how concert life continued during wartime and notes how many works by Flemish composers were performed in those times. Another remarkable phenomenon is covered in Hans Boers' contribution about sponsorship. After World War I, the important German community in Antwerp had been severely diminished, and so had their patronage. Before that war, there were about a thousand members of the Royal Harmonie Society, a third of whom were of German origin... Another little-known fact also comes up. From 1915 to 1936, you could visit the Zoo's Festival Hall for Cinema Zoologie! In the pages about the interwar period, you naturally encounter names like Flor Alpaerts, Lodewijk Mortelmans and Lodewijk De Vocht, Jef Van Hoof, and Jan Blockx. Mahler and Richard Strauss also came by to conduct.
The book also tells the story of the orchestras that played in that Festival Hall. And how it all evolved from the "house orchestra" of the Royal Society for Zoology to the Philharmonie and the current resident orchestra Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, and how the programming changed. At the end there's still the "case study" about how the new hall came about. "From Wooden Kiosk to Golden Hall" is indeed the subtitle of the book. But the entire book itself also deserves to be called a "case study", given how thoroughly the many aspects of 125 years of classical music in Antwerp are covered here.
In a final chapter, the current intendant makes the case for the Elisabethzaal as the home of his resident orchestra. And he describes how, as a young musician, he once had the impression of having landed in a dusty municipal theater, but can now enter "that shoebox shape like in the iconic Vienna Musikverein" the new golden Elisabethzaal. Joost Maegerman has even more praise for the hall, its timbre and sound quality. He gets goosebumps just thinking about it "that the main concert of Laus Polyphoniae would take place in a packed Queen Elisabeth hall."Curious what the people from AMUZ would think of that. The intendant rightly wants more collaboration between the orchestra and the hall to preserve the classical music offering in the city. A unique role. And he gets full support from the director of Antwerp Zoo, the Royal Society for Zoology, who was allowed to introduce this closing chapter.
WHAT: Queen Elisabeth Hall. 125 Years of Classical Music. From Wooden Kiosk to Golden Hall
WHO: Hedwige Baeck-Schilders, et al.
PUBLISHED BY: Hannibal, 223 p.
