Given how little money there is these days to keep serious music up and running, it’s remarkable that wherever you go in the world somebody’s either building or campaigning for a glamorous new concert hall. Only the other week I wrote about the new one in Manchester. And now I’ve been in Germany for the official opening of Dresden’s Kulturpalast.
Dresden is a fascinating place: an architectural showpiece flattened during World War II and pretty desolate through the succeeding GDR years but restored, at last, to former glory. Baroque palaces now line its streets again (though their façades hide chic hotels and offices). And in the centre stands the Kulturpalast, which was an unlovely piece of early 1960s modernism, very GDR (with a great utopian socialist mural on one side) and burdened by a dry acoustic.
