Amsterdam - Concertgebouw

The building of Holland's most famous concert hall, Concertgebouw, was inspired by a German. In 1879 Johannes Brahms was invited to Amsterdam to conduct his Third Symphony. After the concert Brahms said: "You are good people but bad musicians!" The people of Amsterdam took this harsh criticism to heart and formed a society to establish an orchestra and a concert hall that would seat about 2,000. The concert hall was designed by A. van Gendt and inaugurated in 1888. The 65-member orchestra was entrusted to Willem Kes who laid the foundations for the fine reputation both of the orchestra and of the concert hall.

Kes's successor was the 24-year-old Willem Mengelberg who was associated with the Concertgebouw Orchestra for 50 years. Under his direction it developed into one of the best orchestras in the world. He introduced the symphonic music of Mahler and of Richard Strauss who dedicated his "Heldenleben" to Mengelberg. The 1920 Mahler music festival became a high point in the history of the concert hall. The composers Reger, Debussy, Ravel, Hindemith, Milhaud and Stravinsky were guest conductors of their own works in the concert hall. In the early 1980s, however, there were fears for the future of this great concert hall when the building, weighing about 10,000 tons and underpinned by 2,000 posts, threatened to subside into the muddy subsoil. New foundations were the saving of the building, which also got a new glass foyer as part of the renovation works (completed in 1988). The actual concert hall itself, along with its acoustics, reckoned to be among the best in the world, remained unaltered.