The Kaufman Center: Something New for Both Ear and Eye, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Photographs by Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times

Elias Sanabria, who works at the Kaufman Center, vacuuming the red carpet for the opening reception on Tuesday night.

According to the New York Times on schedule and on budget, the Kaufman Center, home to the popular Merkin Concert Hall, opened its doors on Tuesday night with a gala reception and concert after an eight-month, $17 million renovation. On Monday night anyone passing the center, on 67th Street just west of Broadway, might have wondered how on earth the place was going to be ready to go in 24 hours.

Through the new glass walls (replacing nondescript painted metal panels) you could see unpainted portions of the lobby, enormous unopened cartons everywhere and charcoal carpet tiles still covered with protective plastic. Somehow, though, the renovation, the work of Robert A. M. Stern Architects, was sufficiently completed to proceed with the reopening.

It used to be easy to walk right by the center, opened in 1978, with its unremarkable facade. Now a playful marquee juts over the sidewalk with the name Kaufman in bright red neon letters and, just below, the highlighted names of the center’s constituents: the Lucy Moses School, a community arts school for 2,200 students; the Special Music School, a New York City public school for 135 gifted children; and Merkin Concert Hall, an intimate 450-seat auditorium, ideal for chamber music, where some 235 concerts are presented each season.

The lobbies have undergone the most visible changes. What used to be a cramped box office and waiting area has been turned into an inviting, airy space with russet walls and dramatic street-level windows. The lower lobby is now connected to a spacious upstairs lobby (formerly an underused art gallery), where patrons mingled at the pre-concert reception.

Alas, as Lydia Kontos, the longtime executive director of the Kaufman Center, admitted in a welcoming speech, the building’s efficient new air-conditioning system was installed only on Monday, and the staff was still learning to use it. So, on an unseasonably warm January night the atmosphere for the reception was stifling.

Merkin Hall looks hardly changed, except for the firm new seat cushions, fresh paint and buffed wood paneling. Most of the important work that has been done is invisible. There are now high-end audio-visual capabilities to provide easy hookups for recording and broadcasting. All of the ducts and mechanical equipment in the auditorium have been acoustically isolated to ensure that no rumbling disturbs performances. Backstage there are new dressing rooms and ancillary spaces.

The consultants from JaffeHolden Acoustics approached the renovation with a “do no harm” attitude. Merkin has long been valued for its intimate acoustics, though almost any hall of its size would make music sound close-up. The acousticians may not have done much. Still, the sound on opening night seemed clearer and brighter than I remembered it, at times too much so.

This was most noticeable during a performance of Aaron Jay Kernis’s “Simple Songs,” a cycle for soprano and chamber orchestra. The work sets two psalms and texts by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, the medieval composer and poet Hildegard von Bingen and the Buddhist poet Ryokan. Mr. Kernis conducted the Friends of Kaufman Center Orchestra, an ensemble assembled for the occasion. The soloist, Esther Heideman, a soprano with a gleaming voice, showed that she can modulate her sizable sound beautifully to accommodate Mr. Kernis’s lyrical phrases, especially in the harmonically lush and ruminative setting of Psalm 1 and the wistfully Mahlerian epilogue, a setting of Psalm 131.

Yet in the ecstatic song to the Rumi text, which pushed Ms. Heideman into her powerful high voice, her sound, fortified by the brassy ensemble, seemed piercingly loud in the hall — not enough to spoil the effect, though. And better that acoustics be overly bright than the opposite. But the sound was full of body and warmth for a lively and engaging performance by the ensemble of Copland’s jazzy, rambunctious and moody “Music for the Theater” (1925), also conducted by Mr. Kernis.

The concert opened with Margaret Lowe’s “Dawn Carol,” a 1996 work for five flutes, alternatively pensive and fluttering music. The performance was a surround-sound experience, with five members of the Lucy Moses School faculty stationed in the corners and at the back of the hall.

The program ended, appropriately, with a performance by Face the Music, an ensemble of two dozen students (strings, flutes, two pianos, a horn and a trumpet) from the Special Music School. Conducted by Jenny Undercofler, the young musicians presented the premiere of a new version of Ira J. Mowitz’s “Kol Aharon” (“Aaron’s Voice”). The solo violin part, ably played by Haley Gillia, is demanding: fidgety music that shifts from virtuosic flights to elegiac musings. Often the solo violin floats almost unperturbed over the atmospheric hum of the ensemble, enriched with a digital