Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv began as sixty families drawing lots on a sand dune in 1909 — the first Hebrew city, built beside ancient Jaffa — and became, within a generation, the world's largest open-air museum of modernism: the White City, four thousand Bauhaus and International Style buildings raised by émigré architects fleeing Europe in the 1930s, inscribed by UNESCO as a heritage of the modern movement. The grid of Rothschild Boulevard's shaded cycle path, balconies and brise-soleils remains the city's manifesto: light, air and no nostalgia.

Its founding musical act matched the architecture: in 1936 Bronisław Huberman gathered Jewish musicians dismissed from Europe's orchestras into the Palestine Orchestra — Toscanini conducted the first concert — and the Israel Philharmonic remains the city's crown, resident in the Charles Bronfman Auditorium on the culture square. The concert record documents the neighbouring addresses: the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, whose recital hall doubles the museum as concert venue, and the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the city's second ensemble of international standing. Around them runs the nonstop city of the cliché, which happens to be true — beachfront at dawn, start-ups by day, the Carmel market's roar, Jaffa's stones at sunset. A city younger than its orchestras' repertoire: Tel Aviv treats even history as a startup, and it scaled.