São Paulo: A City with an Extraordinary Concert Hall São Paulo: A City with an Extraordinary Concert Hall

The Sala São Paulo is perhaps the most unusual concert hall on this tour. Housed in a historic railway station built in monumental Neoclassical style, it retains clear traces of its origins. Opened in 1999, the hall is an architectural gem whose interior recalls Vienna’s Musikverein. Its acoustics are equally impressive.

The Sala São Paulo owes its outstanding acoustics in no small part to the distinctive architecture of the former railway station. The hall’s near-ideal shoebox shape recalls Vienna’s Musikverein. A movable ceiling made up of motorised panels allows the reverberation time to be adjusted to suit the musical programme. In 2015, The Guardian named the Sala São Paulo one of the ten best concert halls in the world.

The first São Paulo concert featured Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Víkingur Ólafsson. For a special encore, he was joined by strings from the Berliner Philharmoniker in the Largo from Bach’s Keyboard Concerto, BWV 1056. After the interval came Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, its sheer power enhanced by the hall’s spacious acoustics. The audience responded with standing ovations.

An enthusiastically received second concert brought the Berliner Philharmoniker’s visit to Bogotá to a close. Friendship was the thread running through the programme: Elgar’s Enigma Variations portray members of his close circle, while Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is dedicated to his patron and confidante Nadezhda von Meck.