Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Atlanta's concert hall was born from the city's deepest grief. Atlanta Symphony Hall opened on 19 October 1968 inside the Memorial Arts Center at 1280 Peachtree Street - the complex, now the Woodruff Arts Center, built in memory of the 106 Atlanta arts patrons killed in the 1962 Orly air crash while returning from a museum tour of Europe. Robert Shaw conducted the inaugural concert, an all-French program honouring the French citizens whose contributions helped raise the building. The 1,762-seat hall spreads across three levels - 1,074 in the orchestra, 349 in the lower balcony, 339 upper - with up to 82 more seats in the pit depending on the stage configuration. It has been home to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for its entire modern history: the Shaw decades that built the orchestra's choral legend and its Grammy shelf, the first ASO recording made in the room in 1975, and today's 150-plus performances a season spanning subscription classical weeks, movie-in-concert nights, pops and visiting artists. The hall shares the Woodruff campus with the Alliance Theatre and the High Museum of Art, making the Midtown block the Southeast's densest arts address - the MARTA Arts Center station sits directly behind it. The room's acoustics have never enjoyed the reputation of its programming, and a purpose-built replacement hall was proposed and abandoned in the 2000s for want of funding; renovation plans have circulated since. The orchestra, meanwhile, keeps making the argument that the music outruns the architecture. The hall also carries the ASO's education and choral legacies - the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, founded by Shaw in 1970 and still all-volunteer, rehearses and performs here, and its recordings from this stage collected many of the orchestra's Grammy awards. Configuration flexibility keeps the room busier than a pure classical hall: amplified pops nights, film scores with live orchestra, jazz series and rental events all use the stage, and the Woodruff campus setting means a pre-concert hour can take in a Matisse at the High Museum without moving the car.