Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Salle Pleyel is to Paris what Carnegie Hall is to New York and the Philharmonie is to Berlin. It opens tomorrow after four years of restoration.

The event will be greeted with relief, not only by the Orchestre de Paris and its director, Christoph Eschenbach, who had to swap their residence for the unsuitable Theatre Mogador. It will also be welcomed by foreign orchestras, which have stayed away from Paris during the renovation years. The Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Eschenbach, performs Mahler's Symphony No. 2 at tomorrow's opening concert.

The Salle Pleyel has had a checkered history. It was built in 1927 by the eponymous firm of piano makers, the world's oldest among those still in business today. Nine months after its opening, it was devastated by fire and rebuilt on the cheap. Although each of the subsequent generations tinkered with it, the results were never fully convincing.

Things changed in 1998, when the owner, the ailing Credit Lyonnais SA, had to sell it. The buyer, real-estate tycoon Hubert Martigny, decided to do away with the later modifications and recapture the art-deco spirit of the original.

Concert goers who remember the old, dreary hall will be agreeably surprised by the sober elegance, beginning with the lobby, which could be the lounge of an ocean liner.

Burgundy Seats

For the sake of comfort and visibility, the seats -- no longer blue, but burgundy -- have a steeper gradient and are wider than before; their number has been reduced to 1,913 from 2,370. The back rows have disappeared altogether.

The acoustics used to be a weakness of the Salle Pleyel. To improve them, architect Francois Ceria and Artec Consultants Inc., the acclaimed New York sound gurus, have encircled the platform with a wooden wall and added four narrow side balconies and a number of rows behind the orchestra, replacing the old Cavaille- Coll organ with a human reflector.

The proof of the pudding is, of course, in the eating. If the experts got it right, we will only know after having sat through different concerts in different seats.

The main reason for the delay was that Paris's City Hall, the sponsor of the Orchestre de Paris, and the Culture Ministry couldn't agree on who was going to foot the bill. In the end, the ministry relented, agreeing to rent the Salle Pleyel from Martigny for 50 years, after which it will be entitled to buy the hall for 1 euro.

The Salle Pleyel is at 252, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore. For more information and tickets go to http://www.sallepleyel.fr or call (33) (1) 4256-1313.

(Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Jorg von Uthmann at uthmann@wanadoo.fr.

Last Updated: September 12, 2006 01:00 EDT