The curious case of the Munich music halls: German profligacy or high-mindedness gone mad?

For many classical musicians, Germany is the promised land - a place where the President and city mayors like to be seen at concerts, where orchestras typically receive up to 70 per cent of their running costs from government funds, and where a new concert hall can be erected for an eye-watering amount.

Recently, the city of Hamburg spent £736million on such a project and now Bavaria’s capital Munich is going to top even that. It’s a fair bet that if all goes to plan Munich will, by around 2030, have not one but two new concert halls, plus a lavishly refurbished existing concert hall, at a cost that could be north of £1.1 billion. All this for a city with a population around one-sixth of London’s, where a proposal for a Centre for Music at a comparatively modest £288 million were shelved earlier this year.

While it is easy to be envious regarding Germany’s profligacy, one should remember the motives for the spending aren’t entirely high-minded. There is a rivalry between Munich’s two flagship orchestras -  the Munich Philharmonic and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – which is going to cost the tax-payers of Munich and the State of Bavaria dear. The BRSO is expected to be rehoused in a new Konzerthaus which is as much a flamboyant architectural statement as an acoustically perfect space.  Costs keep spiralling, and now stand at around £600 million. The hall has been dubbed “Rattle’s hall”, as Sir Simon Rattle is soon to take over as Music Director of the orchestra.

Meanwhile the Munich Philharmonic has just moved from the Gasteig concert hall, which stands at the heart of a cultural complex including the University of Music and the Performing Arts. The whole site needs serious renovation, estimated to cost over £380 million, which could last as long as eight years. While that is under way all the tenants have moved to a complex in a scruffier quarter of the city, where a newly built concert hall sits amidst an array of handsome repurposed industrial buildings from the 1920s.

Here the story becomes one of ingenious parsimony. Given that the move was only ever meant to be temporary economy was vital, and the total budget was only (only!) £60 million. Of that £34 million was ear-marked for the new concert hall, the Isarphilharmonie. Technically the building is ingenious, designed by the architect Stephan Schütz, while the director of the new complex Max Wagner is keen to stress the area’s inclusive, relaxed feel. “We want people to feel this is an area they can just hang out, they don’t have to have a reason to be there. And we have kept the artists’ studios and businesses that were here before, including a tyre shop. We think this will be the only concert hall in the world where you can have your tyres changed during a concert.”

It’s all admirably democratic, but what will happen to the complex when the Gasteig refurbishment is complete? ““Good question, but very difficult to answer,” says Paul Müller, the director of the Munich Philharmonic.

“Really I am sure it will stay, because the space has such a special quality. I mean I can’t imagine it will just be abandoned.” But then what will be the point of the orchestra’s original home, now being refurbished at such cost?  Not to mention “Rattle’s Hall”? If you add up the capacities of that, the Isarphilharmonie and the Gasteig, plus the cavernous Herkulesaal (the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s current home), there will be more than 7,000 seats available for orchestral concerts by the end of the decade. Might that be too much, even for culture-loving Bavarians?

Suggestions that Rattle’s Hall be scaled back are already being made, which is hardly surprising at a time of increasing economic headwinds. The time just doesn’t seem right for an eye-wateringly expensive new concert hall. Germany has a history of madly extravagant public construction projects (think of Berlin’s new airport), but the time for those is surely over. Something modest and sustainable like the new Isarphilharmonie just seems so much more in tune with the zeitgeist—which is why I reckon it could mark a turning point in concert hall design, not just in Germany but around the world.