 photo by JAMES FREDERICK HOUSEL |
BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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The Seattle Symphony used to play in the Seattle Center Opera House, a fan-shaped hall that requires some forceful playing to fill it. It shared the hall with the local ballet and opera companies, which meant a lot of jostling for time and space. So when real estate developer Jack Benaroya proposed a $15 million donation toward the construction of a tailor-made facility, the symphony jumped at the chance. Five years later, Benaroya Hall has welcomed its occupants. Architec-turally, it's a mixed bag. It presents a low profile and some unremarkable elevations, as if shy about of its grand location above the Seattle Art Museum on the University Street hill climb. The circular Grand Lobby vaguely recalls an airport in scale and materials, though the views from inside are excellent. But what concertgoers have been most concerned about is the sound, and they shouldn't be disappointed. Both the 2,500-seat main auditorium and the 540-seat recital hall are buildings within the building, mounted on vibration-absorbing rubber bearings and surrounded by insulating envelopes of air. A basic shoebox form with virtually no plumb surfaces insures maximum dispersal of the sound from the stage, and the acoustic is lively and clean. It's not a highly reverberant space, so the sound isn't lush, but to the extent that a lack of lushness can mean a gain in definition, this is hardly a flaw. During rehearsal, the room seemed over-sensitive, if anything; the orchestra sounded very large for the near-empty space, especially in uncomfortably bright, violin-squelching brass passages. But when 2,500 sound-absorbing bodies occupied the seats, the stridency largely disappeared. The hall's official coming out began with a piece commissioned from David Diamond for the occasion. With surging, sweeping washes of strings and martial touches from brass and cymbals, it sounded, as Diamond's music tends to, like Aaron Copland. Langsamer Satz, an early pre-serial work for string choir by Anton Webern, followed. Taken together, the two pieces summed up the feelings of most of the people involved in the project: celebratory expansiveness and over-wrought, lump-in-the-throat emotion. A confident and measured rendition of Stravinsky's Firebird followed, the distant bass thunder that begins it proving very effective in the acoustically sensitive room. This being Bayreuth-by-the-Bay, the rest of the concert was given over to Wagner as soprano Jessye Norman joined the orchestra for a suite of excerpts from Götterdäm-merung. The smoky luster of her voice shone through, as did the occasional intonation problem, but my impression was that everyone was so giddy, she could have cleared her throat for half an hour to wild applause. There was an encore, cleverly chosen: the aria "Dich, teure Halle" from Tännhauser ("Cherished hall, I greet you, I greet you with joy, beloved room!"). Conductor Gerard Schwarz and the symphony sounded very good in Benaroya, and their performance showed the qualities of the place that will make them sound even better over time. Even amid thick Wagnerian orchestration, individual voices cut through with remarkable clarity, almost as in a chamber orchestra. The intimate acoustic will require more restraint than the symphony has needed in the Opera House, but it will clearly communicate whatever efforts Schwarz makes toward greater precision and balance. The finishing touches have been put on the structure, but the real work has just begun. It's not just the symphony that will benefit from, and be tested by, this space. Two days after the gala, violinist Kyung Wha Chung demonstrated the main auditorium's pitfalls and potential as a recital hall. The first piece, Schubert's A minor Sonata, was not a promising start; it isn't a memorable work, and Chung sounded small and distant as she played it forgettably, as though wondering why it was on the program. But the room repaid her in volume and warmth for the energy she brought to Bartok's Sonata No. 2. By the time she got to the unaccompanied opening bars of Ravel's Tzigane, not only did she seem like a different violinist from the one who had played the Schubert--impassioned, soulful and utterly convincing--but she sounded as though she were playing in a different place. I have talked to some Portland musicians about what might happen here with seed money of the kind that Jack Benaroya put up in Seattle. What could you do to the Schnitz, for example, with $15 million? ("Burn it," suggested the head of one well-known local ensemble.) There are worse things for a city than an acoustically marginal symphony space, of course--like too many parking garages downtown or a mediocre sports team playing in an expensive facility built with public funds. But people can dream. And in the meantime, they can head north and see how the Seattle Symphony is doing in its new house.
originally published September 23 , 1998
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