Walking along York Way for my first visit to Kings Place, I reflected on how long it has been since London had a brand-new concert hall or a new section of the city was opened for music and for traipsing reviewers. Apart from the two years when the Almeida Festival was in temporary premises on Caledonian Road, the traditionally hard-edged, seamy area has not been linked to classical music in recent years, if ever, and it was stimulating to think of the transformation being effected by the lustrous building, with its wavy glass frontage, coming into view, a development that is only part of the grand regeneration of King’s Cross.

For the time being, Kings Place (unlike the station, it has no apostrophe) stands like a kind of urban island, with Regent’s Canal to one side and Battlebridge Basin to the rear. Looking from the front, you can see greenery (the London Wildlife Trust's Camley Street Natural Park), while the water at the back was a pleasant surprise when I walked through the atrium. The building could hardly be more welcoming. You come straight in off the street (no security checks) to find sofas and cushions, a café, restaurant and art gallery, and a totality of white space that, although enormous and architecturally fascinating, with its interplay of curves and angles, struck me instantly as harmonious and human-scaled. There is, I felt, a simple rightness to the building; if I believed in ley lines, I’d say the architects, Dixon Jones, must have consulted a geomancer.

Kings Place is, of course, an office block — The Guardian occupies half of it — but the developer whose triumphantly realised vision it is, Peter Millican, conceived it from the start as an arts centre and dynamic community space. The London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment have been given rent-free offices and rehearsal facilities here, in return for undertaking educational work. And Kings Place doesn’t only contain London’s first new purpose-built public concert hall since the Barbican opened in 1982. There is a second auditorium, too.

You reach both via a vertiginous escalator to an airy basement that, though deep, doesn’t really feel underground at all. Hall One is a 420-seater shoe box designed for chamber performance (though the stage holds up to 30 musicians), Hall Two a multipurpose space in which 220 people can sit or 330 stand. Hall Two, being wider, feels bigger, and my first impression of Hall One was that it was slightly too small. Actually, my first impression was of how pristinely elegant it is, veneered all over in blond oak (from a single, 500-year-old German tree), with upper panels of Wedgwood blue. Resting as it does on rubber springs, the hall is insulated against intrusive rumblings, and its acoustic is marvellous: “live but warm”, as the oboist Gareth Hulse described it before playing a solo there. The hall is a delight to sit in, whether downstairs or on the wraparound balcony that accounts for 120 of the seats. The capacity is, in fact, not much less than Wigmore Hall’s 540, but the intimacy is greater.

There was ample opportunity to assess both new spaces during the Kings Place opening festival, in which 100 concerts were held in five days, from 9.30am till midnight, each ticket a mere £2.50 if booked online. This generous gesture received a bustling response from the public, which was introduced to the centre’s novel approach to programming. Instead of individual concerts, co-ordinated, as it were, from above, Kings Place prefers to work more democratically, with strands of concerts curated by a separate group or person. The resident London Sinfonietta and OAE are two of these, as is the London Chamber Music Society, moving its operations to Kings Place after 80 years at Conway Hall, and each contributed to the festival (the Sinfonietta’s offerings including a specially written Opening of the House overture by Philip Cashian). During the season proper, now begun, the strands form more or less week-long units (or, in the case of Beethoven Unwrapped, a journey through his chamber music, eight weeks), but for the festival they occupied a morning, afternoon or evening.

The result was an extremely diverse but sharply focused survey of the music-making of today. Jazz and world music in Hall Two went in tandem with high classicism in Hall One, though the demarcation was not absolute. It was interesting to slip contrapuntally from one hall to the other. Hall One highlights, for me, were the cellist Xenia Jankovic and the pianist Jacqueline Bourges-Maunoury in Rachmaninov and Debussy sonatas; the brilliant young flautist Adam Walker playing Varèse; the violist Lawrence Power and the pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips performing Britten’s Lachrymae and short pieces by this strand’s curator,

Colin Matthews; and the Peter Maxwell Davies afternoon, which included his passionate, scholastic lecture on the social meaning of music and the London premiere (by the Brodsky Quartet and the dazzling clarinettist Mark van de Wiel) of his Hymn to Artemis Locheia. Kings Place already feels like home.

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