America's first symphony hall in the round put every seat within 85 feet of the orchestra. Boettcher Concert Hall opened in 1978 as the home of the Denver Symphony Orchestra - today's Colorado Symphony - and the first major American concert room to wrap the audience entirely around the stage, a design by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates with acoustician Christopher Jaffe that placed 80 percent of its seats within 65 feet of the platform. Named for Colorado philanthropist Claude Boettcher and anchoring the Denver Performing Arts Complex at 14th and Curtis downtown, the hall seats 2,679 across orchestra, parquet, dress circles, eight mezzanines and floating overhead rings that circle the room. The engineering serves the intimacy: walls canted to prevent flutter echoes, four-foot undulating acoustic facias channelling sound along every curved surface, 109 adjustable six-foot Lucite discs suspended as an acoustical canopy over the stage, and custom steam-bent plywood seats with high wooden backs designed to simulate a full house at any attendance - a fix for the hot and cold spots that drew mixed reviews in the early years. A 1993 renovation refined the room further, and the 2,400-square-foot stage accommodates 120 musicians. As principal tenant, the Colorado Symphony - reborn in 1990 as a musician-run orchestra after the Denver Symphony's financial collapse - fills the season, with touring concerts, graduations and private events between. The hall shares the city-owned complex, among the largest performing arts campuses in the country, with the Ellie Caulkins Opera House and the Denver Center's theatres, all connected under the great glass Galleria roof a block from the convention center rail stop. The in-the-round experiment that Denver pioneered divided acousticians for decades, but audiences never wavered on the core promise: no concert hall of comparable size puts listeners closer to the players, and the parquet seats adjoining the stage offer the closest thing to sitting inside the orchestra that American symphonic life provides. Graduation seasons, touring artists and the symphony's film-score and pops series keep the room lit year-round beneath its floating rings.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 1000 14th Street, Denver, CO, United States, 80202

Website: https://coloradosymphony.org

Capacity: 2679

Opening Date: 01/03/1978

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