Bach and Repurposed Warehouses

A little while ago I took a trip to Hamburg to see a young virtuosic pianist. Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany, and it certainly felt like it. Even the Elbphilharmonie, where the concert was held, was absolutely huge and rather imposing. The whole building was very modern, with lots of glass, mirrors, and curved walls, which meant I actually couldn’t tell where I was supposed to be going a couple times. It also has a whole parking garage in the lower levels, a hotel, 45 private apartments, and it’s about a 5-minute long escalator ride to the concert areas (although the escalators were also pretty slow). The concert hall was built on top of a former warehouse, and after construction completed in 2016, the concert hall opened in January 2017. The warehouse part is historically important, as after the first warehouse was constructed in the Hamburg Docks and destroyed in WW II, this warehouse was built on the same site in 1966. The warehouse was unused by 2000 due to the increased use of container transport, so it now has been reborn a third time as the lower half of a concert hall/hotel/apartment complex. The upper glass portion holding the concert halls includes three of them, and is supported by 362 spring assemblies between it and the former warehouse so as to be disconnected from the rest of the building for soundproofing reasons. It also consists of 1,100 glass panes, each of which are 4-5 meters wide and over 3 meters high, which gives a sense of the scale of the building.

There was also a walkway around the edge of the building, between the glass and warehouse portions (you can see people walking on it in the photo), and I was able to see across the Elbe river to Steinwerder island, which has several shipyards and chemical plants, which was an interesting contrast to the side I was on. Interestingly, the whole island had only a population of 34, despite being in a pretty central location of the city.

The concert itself was amazing, with the program including a piano arrangement of Bach’s famous Chaconne for solo violin, as well as 16 Chopin and Liszt etudes. The pianist also had a good sense of humor, and when someone’s phone went off right before the first piece he acknowledged it and replayed the ringtone on the piano before starting the Bach prelude. Afterwards, I took a 6 hour train ride back to Bonn, just in time to get up for the next day. Even though I didn’t get to explore too much of Hamburg, the concert was definitely worth the day trip.

-Sam O

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