Merry woodlanders
The concert halls in forests
Waldbühne Berlin
Berlin’s ‘forest stage’ was built for the 1936 Olympic Games; its openair auditorium, designed in the shape of an ancient Greek theatre and seating 22,000, is located in the city’s Olympic Park, where tall and densely packed trees surround the entire complex. The Berlin Philharmonic gives a summer concert there every year.
La grange au Lac Evian
Built in a park of larches by the shore of Lake Geneva, this modern hall, with its acoustically superb auditorium constructed in pine and red cedar wood, takes the idea of a forest into the performing space itself: the stage of this ‘Barn by the Lake’ is surrounded by the trunks of a double row of 260 silver birch trees.
Teatro Amazonas Manaus
Immortalised in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, completed in 1896 and today the centre of a thriving local cultural life, this legendary opera house was built in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest.
The huge fortunes being made in the rubber industry provided a well-heeled audience in the town that called itself the ‘Paris of the Tropics’.