Undulating brushed aluminum walls contrast with Old World bleached wood floors. But excellent as the facility is, location, as they say in real estate, is everything. And this is what really makes the Schonberg Center a center. It attracts the general public for the exhibition hall and the shop, and it is in easy access of the city's center. Though open less than two months when I visited, it was already popular with music lovers and the curious.
School children take excursions.
And famous musicians flock. Conductors Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado dropped in to look at manuscripts of works they planned to conduct. The pianists Maurizio Pollini and Alfred Brendel ran into each other there, and spent a couple of hours going through the exhibition together. At the time of my visit, a table still had on it the materials that opera stage director Peter Stein had examined the previous day. As it did at USC, the Schoenberg family imposes stringent conditions on its donation, defining what is appropriate in terms of the performances and activities of the center, and it monopolizes the center's board.