Sat front row at the symphony...

The front row isn’t the best seat in the house.  The musicians are projecting their sound out, and I prefer at least 10 rows back if I am on the main floor.  Normally we sit in the first balcony, which most people consider to be the best seats in the house

@viber6 

I mean no disrespect to you as a musician, but in my experience musicians don’t always make the best audiophiles.  I have a friend who is very well known violist who is perfectly happy using an AM transistor radio circa 1960 as his only piece of audio.  He knows music so well that I think his mind fills in whats missing.  The perspective that you describe having the brass blow up your butt while you play must be thrilling, but again you know the music so well that you are entranced when you get to experience facets of it in a unique way.  Is that really the experience that you crave if you are going to sit and listen to a recording a few dozen times?  I think the uniqueness would wear off and become fatiguing.

  I have sat first row, dead center, in Boston and Chicago (where I live), so close to the conductor that I could hear the noise made when his perspiration hits the podium.  It is a thrilling perspective, but not an experience that I care to repeat often.

  I have sat in every part of Chicago’s Symphony Hall over the past few decades, jand without question first row balcony takes the cake.  They are also the most expensive seats, so most listeners must agree.  It isn’t because the seats are the most comfortable.

I have to say, @viber6 , that while I disagree with your perspective, I have enjoyed your comments (and those of o many others as well) as you make your case.  For me, while it is interesting to occasionally get that up close perspective, and hear all the extraneous noises that performers generate, a steady diet of such fare wears after a while.  Consider those paintings by old masters such as Rembrandt that have been subjected to analysis by XRay and CT scan.  Frequently all kind of detail is revealed that is not apparent to people looking at the picture.  Art aficionados who know these paintings well are always fascinated by these details . That doesn’t mean that this level of analysis is essential to enjoying the painting because the Artist didn’t intend for viewers to see any of it in the finished work.

  Hearing the spit clog a horn players instrument is interesting, but ultimately distracting.  I don’t need to see how the sausage gets made, I just want to enjoy my meal.  And now that I’ve mixed enough metaphors for the evening it’s off to bed

@viber6 

regarding Szeryng, or any violinist on recordings, I find it hard to listen to many violin recordings because the soloist is overmiked, imo.  The perspective is unnatural, in that they sound so loud compared to the rest of the Orchestra

One of my favorite recordings of Eine Kleine is a string quartet augmented by double bass, although I am out of town and can’t check my shelves to se who the performers were.

So I am in New York and last night heard Kavakos in the Shostakovich First VC .

we sat in the first balcony area. I had last been here before the Pandemic and the Hall renovation is a huge improvement. One can now hear the double basses that kick start the piece. In the Passacaglia the tuba has an important part and as the rest of the Orchestra peels off toward the cadenza the tuba progressively lowers the dynamics and each dimunition was clearly audible.

At that distance Kavakos doesn’t sail above the Orchestra, as does Oistrakh with the NYP and Miropolous in the inaugural recording. No question that the detail craved by viber6 is missing. The instrument was meant to fill an auditorium the size of whatever they now call this place when it evolved from the Viol. So I get the need to want to sit closer and yes, a modern Piano can project so much more in a space such as this.

 I live in Chicago and regularly attend concerts there, but we have family in Boston, New York and Detroit so we regularly attend concerts there as well.  Detroit Orchestra Hall is actually an acoustic gem and a beautiful hall, obviously not as well known as the other cities mentioned  but probably my favorite of the 4 mentioned here .  Next would be Boston, and then a bit of a drop to Chicago Symphony Center, and I would continue to rank New York last, but now much improved.  Internationally, my experience is confined to Barcelona, Vienna, the Rudolfinum in Prague, Amsterdam, and the Garbage Can—oops, the Barbican— in London.  I would love to attend concerts in Germany, and I had a trip that would have taken us to Leipzig, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin wiped out by the Pandemic

I grew up in Detroit.  One of my friends was a violinist who took lessons from Mishakoff in the mid seventies, and I met him a few times, as he used to lead the Youth Orchestra my buddy was in (they played the Bach Double together).  I went to Medical School in Detroit in the early eighties when they were just starting to restore it.  I didn’t get to hear the finished product until a few years ago, and while the acoustics are wonderful, it’s also visually a wonder as well.

   $700 for a balcony seat in Chicago?  We pay $100 for ours.

   Can’t agree with your comments about Vienna or Amsterdam 

+1 @frogman 

  especially the comments about highlighting the soloist in recordings, and the excellent comment about the doubling of instruments to form a unison line.

One of the reasons I attend concerts is because no matter how good my system gets, it will never approximate the sensations of a full orchestra in a large hall.  I especially enjoy hearing familiar works, not because I am adverse to unfamiliar music, but because I usually hear many details on the familiar works in the auditorium .  I just don’t need to be sitting in the conductor’s lap to hear and appreciate these details.  I recently heard a Mozart Piano Concerto where fingernail scrapings on the keys were clearly audible, and I could appreciate the soloist slowing down in some louder passages because of the hall resonance.  In my balcony seat there were very audible reflections from the sidewalls and the musicians were taking slight pauses to allow some of that to dissipate in order not to muddy the sound.  Now @viber6 would retort that a violin can’t be appreciated at that perspective in the same fashion as a modern piano can, and he has a point, so in an ideal situation perhaps sitting closer for VCs is advisable.  That is difficult because when one purchases a concert series you get the same seats all the time, but for one offs it is more feasible..

  Except….there are certain VCs where the Orchestra has at least as important a role.  For me the Sibelius VC isn’t just a vehicle for a hot shot soloist, it is basically a Symphony with a high level Violin Obligatto. I would prefer my regular balcony seat for those Sibelian brass explosions whereas @viber6 would want to be front row to fully appreciate the soloist.  And if you change your perspective every time depending on the work, then as a listener, what is your baseline?  It is a musical equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in that by calibrating where our fannies sit to hear the music, we have distorted our critical facilities for true perception.  No, I ‘ll stick to the balcony perspective whenever possible 

There have been a few posters in this thread that have commented on the parallels between the dilemmas of concert hall perspective and the dilemmas in our home systems (analytical versus general perspective)..  A shout out to them for making this observation.  I used to have a DAC, the Mytek Manhattan, that was like an MRI machine for detail.  Ultimately I tired of the forest for the trees thing and got another DAC that gave me a mid hall perspective while not skimping on detail.

  I attended one concert in Heinz Hall, Pittsburgh probably 30 years ago.  I thought it was a great venue, although I am a bit fuzzy at this point about the details