Tchaikovsky Concert Hall

Vsevolod Meyerhold meant the building on Triumfalnaya Square to be Moscow's largest and most modern theatre, with the audience wrapped around a thrust stage. He did not live to see it finished, the theatre project died with him, and the unfinished shell was completed instead as a concert hall, Dmitry Chechulin shaping the interior. It opened on 12 October 1940, the centenary of Tchaikovsky's birth, and took his name. Meyerhold's plan survives in the geometry of the room: an ellipse in which the stalls, three amphitheatres and two balconies curve round the platform to seat about 1,500, so that the orchestra sits within the audience rather than in front of it. A Rieger-Kloss organ of some eighty stops was installed in 1959. The hall is the principal address of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, and orchestral and dance companies alike have long counted it as home.