Kuppelsaal

A dome modelled on the Pantheon covers it, and with 3,570 seats the Kuppelsaal remains the largest classical concert hall in Germany. Paul Bonatz and Friedrich Eugen Scholer, working with Michael Kott, raised it between 1911 and 1914 in a stripped neoclassical manner and equipped it with a Furtwängler & Hammer organ of 118 stops. Allied bombing gutted the building; Bonatz himself took part in the rebuilding, which departed in places from what had been lost. The hall anchors the Hannover Congress Centrum today, and a thorough restoration between the summer of 2015 and January 2016 brought fabric and acoustics up to date. Its scale is the point: few rooms in Europe let an orchestra address so many people at once and still sound like a concert hall rather than an arena.