“The much-heralded union between America’s oldest orchestra and its most prestigious concert hall – announced for the 2006-07 season – would have created a gigantic nonprofit corporation with an endowment of around $350 million. But there were problems from the beginning, both legal (Lincoln Center had indicated that it would seek to hold the Philharmonic, its tenant for the past 41 years, to a contract that ran until 2011) and aesthetic (the merger would have greatly diminished the variety of programming at Carnegie Hall).”