New York – Carnegie Hall

Our journey begins amid Manhattan’s roaring grid of streets, with its honking taxis and constant hum of activity. Step inside Carnegie Hall, though, and you’ll want to mind your volume: the acoustics make every cough – and every pianissimo – audible.

The hall opened in May 1891, and the guest of honour at its five-day opening festival was Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who crossed the Atlantic for the occasion and conducted the concerts himself. Nervous and homesick, he was nonetheless fêted. “I am ten times more famous here than in Europe,” he wrote to his nephew after his appearances. Tchaikovsky’s music returns to New York this year with the Berliner Philharmoniker: his Symphony No. 4 is on the programme.

The orchestra made its New York debut in 1955, on its inaugural US tour. Just ten years after the end of the Second World War, the visit prompted protests, intensified by conductor Herbert von Karajan’s former membership of the Nazi Party. Yet the orchestra quickly won over audiences, and New York has since become one of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s most frequent destinations.

The main hall – officially the Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage since 2006 – seats around 2,800 people across five steeply raked tiers. A curious footnote: Carnegie Hall faced demolition in the late 1950s, until a citizens’ campaign saved it in the 1960s, led by the violinist Isaac Stern, whose name the auditorium now bears.

Bogotá – Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo

From Manhattan, the tour continues to Bogotá, 2,640 metres above sea level, tucked between green Andean slopes, with weather so changeable that locals joke the city has four seasons in a single day. Tough conditions for professional musicians – the thin air brings a real risk of altitude sickness, and instruments respond differently up here too. Brass and woodwind players in particular have to recalibrate. What does Strauss sound like at this altitude? You’ll have to be in the hall to find out.

This guest performance marks a first for the Berliner Philharmoniker: in its entire history, the orchestra has never visited Colombia. The capital has a rich classical music tradition and has been a UNESCO Creative City of Music since 2012. Its oldest opera house, the neoclassical Teatro Colón in the historic centre – not to be confused with the opera house of the same name in Buenos Aires – was designed by the Italian architect Pietro Cantini and opened in 1892, just months after Carnegie Hall.

By contrast, the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo, designed by the Colombian architect Daniel Bermúdez – the venue for this tour – is much newer: it opened on 26 May 2010. With around 1,310 seats, its acoustics are equally suited to opera, dance and large-scale orchestral music. Access is central to the venue’s mission. The programme “Cien mil niños al Mayor” has brought schoolchildren from all 20 of the city’s districts into this hall, many of them attending a concert for the very first time. Since 2013, the theatre has also run its own classical music festival, the “Festival Internacional de Música Clásica de Bogotá”, held every two years during Holy Week.

São Paulo – Sala São Paulo

Further south, greater São Paulo is home to more than 20 million people, its skyscrapers stretching to the horizon, its traffic never quite falling silent. Amid this immense bustle, the city’s most famous concert hall occupies part of a former railway station.

The Estação Júlio Prestes was built between 1926 and 1938 for the Sorocabana Railway, financed by coffee barons eager to move their harvest to the port of Santos – a grand structure in a style best described as “modernised Louis XVI”, designed by Christiano Stockler das Neves. The station’s former winter garden happened to have an almost perfect shoebox shape, the geometry behind the celebrated acoustics of halls such as Boston’s Symphony Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein.

In the 1990s, plans for a new concert hall converged with efforts to revive this historic building. After an 18-month renovation, the Sala São Paulo opened on 9 July 1999. The American firm Artec was responsible for the acoustics: 1,498 seats, 22 boxes, no carpets, no curtains, heavy walls – and, above it all, a movable ceiling of motorised panels that can be raised or lowered depending on the programme, allowing the reverberation time to be adjusted, like an instrument in itself. Suburban trains still rattle past next door. In 2015, The Guardian included the hall in a list of ten of the world’s best concert halls.

Buenos Aires – Teatro Colón

The final stop on our journey brings us to a legendary hall. Today’s Teatro Colón took twenty years to build and outlived its architects: Francesco Tamburini died in 1891, and his successor Vittorio Meano was murdered in 1904. It was the Belgian Jules Dormal who ultimately completed the house, lending its decoration a French touch. The curtain rose on 25 May 1908, Argentina’s national holiday, with Verdi’s Aida. The house seats around 2,500, with standing room for roughly a thousand more, across seven tiers dressed in gold and red velvet.

It’s worth looking up: the dome fresco isn’t original to the building, since Marcel Jambon’s paintings were damaged by damp after a carnival ball in the 1930s. In 1966, the Argentine artist Raúl Soldi repainted the 318 square metres with dancers, singers and figures from the commedia dell’arte – the theatre watching itself perform. 

And the city itself? Buenos Aires brings tango to mind – yet the genre’s most famous ambassador, Astor Piazzolla, had a complicated relationship with the genre; he wanted to be a serious composer. He travelled to Paris with suitcases full of symphonies to study with the celebrated teacher Nadia Boulanger, who leafed through everything, praised the craftsmanship – and then observed: here it sounds like Stravinsky, there like Bartók, but nowhere could she find Piazzolla. She questioned him, he later said, “like an FBI agent”, until he admitted that he played the bandoneon and performed one of his tangos for her. Boulanger took his hands: “You idiot – that’s Piazzolla.”

Classical music and tango aren’t as far apart as they might seem. Bolero Berlin, an ensemble of  musicians from the Berliner Philharmoniker, was formed to perform South American music. Find out how that came about, and what connects South American and European music, in our interview with Martin Stegner and Raphael Haeger.