The Philharmonic Is Out of Its Hall This Year. It Doesn’t Pack Light.

With David Geffen Hall under renovation, the orchestra — and eight of its cellos, six double basses, six timpani and two grand pianos — must move from hall to hall.

The New York Philharmonic had just finished a 90-minute concert and backstage at Alice Tully Hall, Lawrence Tarlow, its principal librarian, went quickly to work, filing stacks of sheet music of works by Beethoven, Copland, Anna Clyne and George Walker into four trunks, each nearly as tall as Tarlow himself, ready to be loaded on a truck. Stagehands scurried around packing up cellos, basses, timpani, pianos and other equipment.

With the Philharmonic’s home, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, in the midst of a $550 million renovation, the orchestra is plunging into its new season as an orchestra without a hall of its own. With some good-natured grumbling — “It’s like being on a tour for an entire concert season,” said Tarlow, who is beginning his 37th season at the Philharmonic — the orchestra cleared out of Alice Tully, at Lincoln Center, and prepared to head to its next temporary home: the Rose Theater, a few blocks south.

“We are nomads,” Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, said a few days later as he stood in his (temporary) dressing room at the Rose. “You always have to adjust. It’s like you are putting a new coat on and you never know how it’s going to fit.”