Get ready, get set. Da-da-da-duh!
If all goes as planned, exactly 27 days from now, Orchestra Hall will resound with that famous opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
And the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will sport a new address: Symphony Center.
Symphony Center is just one of several major building projects that are popping up across the American symphonic landscape this season. Philadelphia’s 140-year-old Academy of Music is presently undergoing a multiyear, $31-million restoration and renovation that is set for completion in 1999. And there are others.
But all of them are small change compared to the $110-million expansion of the CSO’s 93-year-old home — by far the most costly and ambitious building project of any U.S. symphony orchestra this season — and scheduled for public unveiling Oct. 4.
To be sure, many of the visual and physical comforts for which the Daniel Burnham-designed beaux-arts-style auditorium has been widely beloved for 93 years will still be in place. So many other things will be new and different, however, that longtime patrons may well feel as if they’ve entered an alternate universe.
As they pass through the sunlit rotunda and the spacious new arcade levels into the repainted auditorium, the most dramatic addition will be immediately visible over the redesigned Armour Stage: The new acoustical crown, a 30-by-40-foot steel-and-glass saucer weighing 11,300 pounds and poised on adjustable cables.
Audiences will not only occupy acoustically correct new seats — red, of course — on the main floor, in the boxes and in the balconies, but some people will hear the orchestra from a new location — 200 terrace seats located behind the orchestra where only the choral risers formerly were.
They will also get to hear music, eventually, in the center’s new rehearsal and performance space, Buntrock Hall, that will seat audiences of up to 300.
Symphony Center, in short, bestrides two centuries, the 20th and the early 21st. Rather than just one building, as before, the center is a complex of three buildings intended to make more music more accessible to more people, including segments of the community who were previously under represented at Orchestra Hall.
But the biggest potential change has nothing to do with things people can see but things they can hear.
Orchestra Hall might have remained just as it was for another century were there not a consensus of musicians, audience members, press and acoustical experts that the hard, parched sound of Orchestra Hall was overdue for fixing. A majority of CSO players, and many listeners, too, have long felt it’s high time the CSO sounded as good in its own hall as it does when it plays in one of the world’s sonically superior auditoriums, such as the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
That’s why CSO president Henry Fogel sent for Lawrence Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard, of the Downers Grove firm of Kirkegaard and Associates, is one of the world’s most widely respected and experienced acousticians, having fine-tuned most of the world’s concert rooms and opera houses. He says he has done everything possible to make Orchestra Hall “the kind of hall Orchestra Hall wanted to be all along” — warmer and more reverberent.
Fingers are crossed: previous attempts to improve the sound only made it worse. Right now, nobody — not even Kirkegaard — knows how the reborn hall will sound until the crown is hung, the orchestra is playing on stage and there is a full house of listeners out front. The CSO won’t begin rehearsals for the new season until Sept. 23. A “hard hat” private concert for patrons and construction personnel is set for the 30th, four nights before the official opening.
At this writing, construction crews are applying the final physical niceties to the interior. Everything, we are assured, is running on schedule and will be ready for opening night. But there is one wild card and that’s the S-word: strike. It’s possible the orchestra and its musicians won’t be able to agree on terms of a new labor contract in bargaining sessions set to resume after their present contract expires next Sunday; this would result in a labor action. Although a strike probably wouldn’t scuttle the Oct. 4 gala, later performances would have to be canceled or postponed.
In the spirit of the new season, however, let us look on the optimistic side.
The powers that be are filling Orchestra Hall with more music — some 200 events in all — than ever before, including a three-week inaugural festival. There are four sold-out gala concerts, beginning with the Oct. 4 opener with Daniel Barenboim appearing as conductor and pianist, the Chicago Symphony Chorus and Placido Domingo singing excerpts from Verdi’s “Otello.”
Barenboim will return Oct. 11 and 12 with more Beethoven — the Ninth Symphony — part of a season-long survey of that composer’s symphonies, piano concertos, string quartets, violin sonatas and the opera “Fidelio.” The inaugural festival will conclude Oct. 25 with a gala tribute to music director laureate Georg Solti on his 85th birthday and his 1,000th concert with the CSO. Barenboim will perform the “Emperor” Concerto as part of an all-Beethoven program.
Between these black-tie events there will be a populist showcase of the many kinds of music to be presented at Symphony Center in the seasons ahead. The title, “A Day of Music,” covers only half of it. For 24 hours, beginning at 12 midnight Oct. 5 and running more or less continuously until 12:59 that night, people can hear family concerts, chamber music, jazz and pop events — you name it. It’s all for free, and listeners may come and go as they please. Tours of the new facility will be held throughout the day, while food and refreshments will be available for purchase.
