I went to visit sugar and oil traders in Hamburg a few times over the years, unfortunately before the Elphi opened in 2017.
These days cities are mad for modern statement architecture. Paris got it out of its system with the Centre Pompidou and seems satisfied with that in the centre of the city – lucky Parisians. Nobody seems quite sure what the Elphi represents: a hoisted sail, wave, iceberg or quartz crystal maybe, plonked on top of a 1963 brick warehouse. It is traditional in the sense that it went more than three times over budget. Aubron Waugh commented in The Spectator in 1988 that if the Sydney opera house represents sails the wind must be blowing in opposite directions at the same time.
I would enjoy a short break in Hamburg later this year but meanwhile the Elbphilharmonie are in London next week to play at the Proms. I am going. If it rains I will take the tube to South Kensington and the pedestrian tunnel to Exhibition Road. I don’t think of much as I walk competitively trying to overtake but I’m not a poet.
“There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.”
The Underground, Seamus Heaney
Copyright © The Estate of Seamus Heaney, 1984. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
The Elphi won’t disappoint, particularly if you have a Hamburg chum and get whisked, during the interval, to a glass-sided champagne bar with a precipitous view of the harbour and solicitous waiters in scarlet-lined tailcoats and red basketball boots.
Seamus Heaney’s words are magic.