Melbourne Town Hall
August 3, 2018

One of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s strengths is the range of excellent venues it has at its disposal across the city, and the Town Hall is of course no exception. Its acoustic strengths and weaknesses have been debated for over a century and although the venue lacks the luxuries of Melbourne’s more modern concert halls, the Town Hall is eminently suited to orchestral music. Much is made of more modern, drier halls and their comforts, but our older venues without fail provide a unique and charming experience. The Town Hall is a warm space and is well-suited to large, Romantic symphonic forces, particularly when the music is similarly rich.  Audiences agree, and Friday’s night’s instalment of the MSO’s Town Hall series was sold out for three months, making it perhaps the orchestra’s biggest success of the 2018 season.

Piers Lane. Photo © Keith Saunders

When Tibor Paul, from the Hungarian Broadcasting Corporation, took up the baton as a guest conductor of the Victorian Symphony Orchestra for a concert including Kodály’s Dances of Galánta at the Town Hall in September 1951, local press wondered if something was amiss. The conducting was...