On November 4, Rebecca Schmid of the New York Times wrote about “Poland’s Concert Hall Revival,” which opens with a discussion of the new ICE Congress Center—ICE as an acronym for “International Conferences & Entertainment”—in Kraków:
The center’s auditorium, with its terraced seating and capacity of 1,800, may seem commonplace to concertgoers in Western Europe, the United States or Japan. But for many Poles, its opening on Oct. 16 signaled a new era. The building is the latest in a spate of new concert halls that are seen as symbolic of the triumph over the Communist past and of the adoption of modern European values.
The article also introduces new halls in Katowice, Szczecin, Wrocław and Gorzów Wielkopolski, all of which were built at least in part with money from the European Union. Schmid discusses multiple aspects of this boom in growth, from the benefit to the cultural brand of Poland to questions regarding the economic benefit of using public funds in this way.
Read the entire article at www.nytimes.com.
[Sources: facebook.com, nytimes.com]