Politics behind new French concert hall

Over the last two decades, as successive French governments have poured money into renovating the Louvre and building new museums, an opera house and a national library in Paris, lovers of orchestral music have grown resentful.

Even with the vocal backing of the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, their insistent calls for construction of a state-of-the-art concert hall went unheeded.

Now, just weeks before President Jacques Chirac leaves office, their impatience has been rewarded with the unveiling of an eye-catching design for a US$260 million concert hall by the French architect Jean Nouvel. The Philharmonie de Paris, as it will be called, is scheduled to open in the Parc de la Villette, in northeast Paris, in 2012.

The aluminum-clad building -- which in a mode resembles a mound of loosely stacked plates topped by a 52m-high sail -- will have a 2,400-seat auditorium designed in what experts call a "vineyard" style, with the audience on all sides of the orchestra on multilevel "terraces."

Once completed, if its acoustics earn praise, the Philharmonie could rank among Europe's best concert halls.

Politics than culture, however, were behind the decision to place the new hall in La Villette, an outlying zone. In the early 1980s, reacting against the concentration of cultural institutions in central Paris, France's government, then led by the Socialists, decided to turn this area, once crowded with slaughterhouses, into a new cultural district within easy reach of low-income suburbs to the east.