Tune in to all the vibes around Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall was almost lost to the wrecker’s ball in 1960 when developers wanted the Seventh Avenue site between 56th and 57th streets for an office tower. Lincoln Center was under construction, which seemingly made the hall redundant, particularly at a time when there wasn’t the appreciation for jewels like the old terra cotta and spotted brick building there is today. Isaac Stern, the violinist, led a campaign to save the hall, energizing the classical music community to say no to City Hall and leading the effort to restore it in 1986.

Today, Carnegie Hall is as much a part of Stern’s legacy as his playing. It is an infinitely better place to hear classical music than Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Carnegie’s main hall, Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, rivals Boston’s Symphony Hall and Cleveland’s Severance Hall in terms of acoustics and old-world charm. I’ve rarely seen a pair of concerts that so captured the transcendent spirit of musical modernism as Pierre Boulez’s concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last year. The hall made the crispness and clarity of Boulez’s conducting and the Chicagoans’ playing of Bartok and Stravinsky, Dalbavie, and Boulez himself, apparent to even those who thought that great music had ended in the 19th century.

And the hall is famous not just for classical music. You could teach a seminar on American music using just the live concerts recorded there (most are available in the gift shop) — Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Stevie Ray Vaughan, even early Bob Dylan.

Today it’s home to festivals that not only showcase the talents of one artist, but also show where he or she fits into the musical cosmos. It might be the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard demonstrating Messiaen’s indebtedness to Debussy or David Byrne offering a rock musical about Imelda Marcos. With three halls of varying sizes, the mix of emerging artists and established greats feels like one-stop shopping for quality music of all genres.