Right now, Henry Fogel should be the most nervous president of any symphony orchestra in America.
Not only does he have a Chicago Symphony Orchestra season to open at the end of next week, he has a concert hall to open.
And not just any auditorium, but a 93-year-old Orchestra Hall that has undergone such an extensive face lift over the last three years that it might as well be new. Coming in at a cost of roughly $110 million, this is by far the most expensive and ambitious building project a U.S. orchestra has undertaken in recent years. It’s enough to have any president chewing his fingernails to the quick.
Especially a president with a new hall and a new labor contract with his 104 musicians, now at the bargaining table, to be paid for.
But when I paid a visit to his cluttered office one morning in July, he seemed anything but anxious, eager to talk about Symphony Center, which he guided from inception to completion. For Fogel, the expanded, modernized home of the Chicago Symphony is more than a building; it’s a mission, he says: “The idea is to rally around this auditorium and build for the next century. It’s a cliche, but it’s real.”
Nearly every morning before starting work, he checks out the progress of renovation and construction next door, either personally or through facilities manager Sandra K. Seim. Part of her routine is to prowl the construction site, hard hat in place, exchanging information with Turner Construction Co. personnel, then reporting back to the symphony management. Everything is running on schedule, she says. Which means Fogel can rest a bit easier, assuming there are no difficulties with the musicians’ contract. (It was to have expired Sept. 14, a week after the Magazine was printed.)
And so the countdown to the Oct. 4 gala inaugural concert continues.
A true festival hall
Daniel Burnham, the hall’s original architect, famously advised the city’s movers and shakers to “make no little plans.” Roughly a century later, the latter-day movers and shakers who decided to turn Orchestra Hall into a cultural shopping center took him at his word.
Fanfares heralding the “new” hall began sounding three years ago. Pedestrians passing the phoenix-like complex that was steadily rising on the property bordered by Michigan Avenue, Adams Street and the elevated train tracks at Wabash and Adams noticed the boarded-up doors and windows, the trucks, the teams of workers, the vacant lots where aged buildings once stood. For those who didn’t know something big was happening, banners on every street corner proclaimed, “The excitement is building!” And an advance peek at the reborn Orchestra Hall suggests the excitement is warranted.
Symphony Center planners promise Chicago what CSO music director Daniel Barenboim bullishly calls “a true festival hall,” a place of musical and social congress intended to bring more people more fully into the cultural life of the city, as well as to bolster the city’s image as a world-class arts center.
But the center has at least as much to do with business as it does with art. All across the nation, symphony orchestras and opera companies are making huge investments in their futures, realizing they cannot maintain musical quality or hope to attract new audiences for the millennium in antiquated facilities.
Among the auditoriums considering, beginning or completing major renovations are Philadelphia’s Academy of Music; San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House; Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center Concert Hall; and Cleveland’s Severance Hall.
The fact that orchestra trustees had the temerity to substantially change an auditorium many generations of concert-goers have loved has made the Symphony Center project controversial from the day it was announced to the public as a fait accompli on a fine spring day in 1995. Fogel realizes there are nostalgists in the musical community who would have preferred that he had left Orchestra Hall–which even he agrees was a fine room for recitals and chamber music–just as it was. But he could not allow nostalgia to impede progress. “Many of the people who think the old Orchestra Hall was a wonderful hall haven’t heard any other concert hall,” he argues.
Anyone who knows the exceptional warmth and beauty of sound the CSO can produce in the superior acoustics of such great European halls as Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal or Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw must concede that the old Orchestra Hall offered nothing comparable as a listening environment. The new Orchestra Hall will put Chicago in the upper echelon of major cities with sonically superior auditoriums–or so CSO officials insist.
As a matter of fact, it was acoustics, more than any other single factor, that drove the Symphony Center project.
Fogel gave project acoustician Lawrence Kirkegaard unprecedented authority over the sonic and physical redesign of the Orchestra Hall auditorium. Kirkegaard–who heads the Downers Grove architectural acoustics firm Kirkegaard and Associates–is an experienced, respected acoustician whose track record for successful renovations and new halls is high, though not unblemished. Few acousticians, even expert ones, get it right every time, but Kirkegaard has enjoyed more than his share of hits, around the nation and around the world.
“Whatever Larry recommended, we did,” says Fogel. “I don’t know of too many halls where the acoustician had that kind of authority that haven’t turned out well.”
Resonating with all of Chicago
Symphony-goers may, at first, barely recognize the place.
The stately facade at 220 S. Michigan Ave. bearing the names Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner remains as it was–spruced up, to be sure, but untouched. The beige, cream and gold color scheme of the auditorium, the gilded plaster rosettes and stylized tendrils re-created from Burnham’s original 1904 beaux-arts-style designs, the red seats and carpeting, all will look comfortingly familiar.
But very little else will be as concert-goers remember.
A larger stage, roomier and more comfortable seating (including 200 permanent terrace seats at the rear of the stage, behind the orchestra), new and refurbished lobbies and many more restrooms are just some of the design changes created by architect Joseph Gonzalez of the nationally prominent architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to make old Orchestra Hall appear brand new.
People are going to have to make adjustments to the place. For starters, they must think of the center as a musical environment rather than merely a performance space.
The public will be encouraged to visit throughout the day and evening hours. If they don’t wish to attend a CSO event, they can learn something about music in the new Eloise W. Martin Center–ECHO is its acronym. Or they can catch a noontime chamber or after-work concert in the new Rotunda. Or simply have coffee in the new ground-floor Rhapsody restaurant. Such amenities are designed to make the concert experience more pleasant; if they also help to make the hall more profitable in the long run, so much the better.
The addition of four levels of arcades and a rotunda at the north end of Symphony Center, plus a new rehearsal/performance space–Buntrock Hall–in the new Artistic Support Wing, will more than double the amount of space available to the public, orchestra musicians and staff.
And there is the civic factor. Symphony Center is intended to anchor what Mayor Daley and others envision as a culturally rejuvenated North Loop. According to this scenario, a synergy would emerge between the center and the various historic Loop theaters either earmarked for renovation or already renovated–including the Harris and Selwyn, Oriental, Palace and Chicago theaters–pumping more money and bringing new crowds into downtown Chicago.
With the force of a fierce March wind sweeping off Lake Michigan, audience need and social change have propelled a once tradition-bound institution–primarily sustained by masterpieces of dead European composers performed for a privileged, rather exclusive public–into the new American century.
Fogel is, of course, well aware the CSO must reach out to those segments of the community that have long felt disenfranchised from so-called highbrow institutions such as the CSO. Convincing the entire community that great symphonic music is for the many as well as the few is essential to the survival of every symphony orchestra in the land. By definition, Symphony Center, because its makers intend it to be many things to many people, is better equipped to trumpet that message much louder than Michigan Avenue’s old temple to Orpheus ever could.
As a matter of fact, the greatly expanded schedule of classical, pop, jazz and world music events announced for the inaugural season should lay to final rest any lingering associations between Orchestra Hall and musical snobbism, keeping the complex alive with the sound of music more than 200 nights this season.
“Symphony Center will serve Chicago with a much greater and more diverse scope of activities than is possible in a concert hall built seven years after the death of Brahms,” Fogel says, shifting to his Chamber of Commerce tone. “The orchestra now has a facility we believe will resonate with all of Chicago. We like to think of it as a place where we can make music less intimidating, more meaningful to people.”
A troubled history
The basic problem with the old Orchestra Hall was simple. The nonagenarian facility was a product of an era not our own.
In 1904, when Burnham’s pride and joy became the permanent home of the Chicago Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”–arguably the most influential piece of music written in this century–was still nine years in the future. Arnold Schoenberg had yet to compose his most radical works. Indeed, 35 percent of the repertoire the orchestra plays today had not been written.
Burnham designed the hall to the specifications of Theodore Thomas, founder and first music director of the orchestra known today as the Chicago Symphony. Thomas was eager to move his orchestra out of the cavernous Auditorium Theatre, with its “deadly mishmash of sound,” as one writer described it.
At the time, Chicago’s civic leadership made a promise to all who contributed to the construction of the new facility. The new building, they said, would “have a lasting influence on musical art . . . from generation to generation.”
For nearly a century afterward, Orchestra Hall did exert an influence on the musical art of Chicago–much greater, in fact, than our forebears could have envisioned. But even those closely attached to the old place had to admit that was the orchestra’s doing, not the hall’s.
Just as music has changed tremendously over the last 93 years, so have audiences’ expectations of comfort. At the old Orchestra Hall, cramped lobby areas made for horrendous pre- and post-concert traffic jams, while the dearth of restrooms–especially women’s restrooms–created long lines during intermissions. Narrow seats and the lack of legroom between rows left many concert-goers feeling like sardines in a tin.
The essential problem was that the limitations of the building site had forced severe compromises in the hall’s design. Instead of the classic shoebox shape favored in European and American concert halls, Chicago got a blunt-ended hall with a wide, shallow stage enclosed by a fan-shaped proscenium. This created endless problems with sound, for players and listeners alike.
On the plus side, Orchestra Hall always had a nice intimate feeling for its size–2,580 seats–and few of those seats were more than 150 feet from the stage. On the minus side, the auditorium has always been starved for resonance.
When the hall was full, the sound–although clear and full of impact–was drier and less reverberant than that of any major concert room. Loud chords vanished like the sound of a hand clap. And the sound quality fluctuated greatly throughout the hall: best at the front of the lower balcony and in the rear of the gallery, muffled in the main floor seats under the boxes.
While Orchestra Hall could be a splendid recording hall, especially during the Fritz Reiner era (1953 to 1963), many listeners were aware that something was seriously missing. Says Fogel: “It never was right to have an entire portion of the color palette this orchestra produces simply lost to listeners in Chicago. That frustrated a lot of people.”
And no group was more frustrated than the musicians of the Chicago Symphony.
For many years orchestra musicians, particularly string players, complained about the quality of their sound as reflected back to them in the auditorium. Players seated at the sides and rear of the orchestra all said they were unable to hear one another properly. “We were always fighting a situation that was far from optimum,” says one such musician, CSO bass player Roger Cline.
Over the years, numerous attempts were made to “fix” the hall. But such attempts were too modest in scope to make much difference, or they were driven by architects and engineers with negligible or no input from acousticians. The 1966 renovation undertaken by restoration architect Harry Weese actually made the acoustics worse.
Which meant that Kirkegaard not only had to undo past damage to the sound but make it state-of-the-art, a tall order indeed.
The acoustician says his overriding objective was “to bring this hall into the 21st Century” without losing the distinctive presence and impact of sound many audience members cherish.
With that goal in mind, he introduced the most striking, and perhaps most controversial, new design element into the auditorium–an acoustical crown. In the architects’ rendering, the 11,300-pound canopy looks like a Steven Spielberg-style saucer hovering above the Armour Stage, all sculpted steel, glass and lights. Its function is to enable the orchestra players to hear each other better, and to focus the sound for listeners on the main floor.
Will Kirkegaard succeed? That is the $110-million question hovering over Symphony Center. The man’s track record for giving acoustically problematic concert halls a new lease on life is good (he redid San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall and now is working on restoring the Philadelphia Academy of Music and London’s Barbican), but he also has produced a few sonically mediocre auditoriums, such as Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall.
Talk to the orchestra musicians and the majority seem optimistic. “I think (the hall) has to get better than it was,” says CSO violinist David Taylor. “I’d be very surprised if it sounds worse.”
Selling the center
By the late 1980s, orchestra trustees were convinced Orchestra Hall no longer was adequate to meet the growing needs of the institution or the community that was expected to maintain it into the millennium.
Two alternatives presented themselves: Either move the orchestra to a new hall or reinvent Orchestra Hall.
For Fogel, getting his patrons and board to line up behind the Symphony Center project was crucial if they were to successfully sell it to potential funders and the community at a time when other local arts institutions–notably Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art–were pursuing big bucks to pay for building projects of their own.
The Symphony and Lyric Opera had the luxury of splitting $100 million raised by the corporate and foundation communities. The opera completed a major overhaul of its backstage and storage facilities in 1996.
At this writing, the orchestra has collected $103.5 million in gifts and pledges toward the Symphony Center project, leaving $6.5 million yet to be raised, according to Michael Gehret, CSO vice president for marketing and development. The city of Chicago and state of Illinois each gave, or are in the process of giving, $2.5 million.
It was inevitable that the folks who stand to benefit most from the improvements to Orchestra Hall, the CSO subscribers, will be expected to foot some of the expenses.
This season, subscribers faced a 5 percent average increase in ticket prices–“a little higher than the rate of inflation,” says Fogel–to help offset the added costs. “We have had a few complaints from people about the increase,” he concedes. “I wish we didn’t have to charge more for seats, but our losses would be considerable if we didn’t.”
With the subscription renewal rate remaining steady at about 85 percent, and new subscriptions running 5 percent higher than last year, Fogel doesn’t appear worried there will be a subscriber revolt. Meanwhile, with increased programming and increased staff, the orchestra’s operating budget has risen from approximately $42 million last season to just under $50 million in 1997-98.
Nobody ever claimed bringing bucketloads of musical culture and entertainment to the community doesn’t cost money.
A champagne farewell
The groundbreaking for Symphony Center took place in May 1995, when Barenboim led a ceremonial fanfare before a wrecking ball tore into the first of four buildings already slated for razing along Wabash Avenue. Major construction was confined to the summer months to avoid interrupting the CSO subscription season any more than necessary. Presenting concerts-in-exile at Medinah Temple in May of 1996 and 1997 actually had a residual benefit for the orchestra: It gave them the chance to perform Mahler’s mammoth Symphony No. 8, whose hundreds of performers would have been uncomfortable in the old Orchestra Hall but proved ideal for the wide open spaces of Medinah.
Meanwhile, back at the site, workers battled dust and blazing heat, which turned the basement into a furnace when outside temperatures topped 100 degrees. Electricians, carpenters, engineers, masons, flooring workers, mill workers operated in round-the-clock shifts. During the construction, an auditorium long associated with great symphonic music and early-century elegance looked more like a war zone in Bosnia than a concert room in Chicago.
“Ask any of the 1,000 people who have been involved in this job and they’ll tell you this was the most complex interactive project they have ever worked on,” reports facilities manager Seim.
“Everybody knew there never will be another major overhaul of Orchestra Hall in their lifetime, that they had one shot at getting it right. So everyone from top to bottom was committed to delivering a quality project,” she says.
Still, that may not be enough to comfort those who had made personal emotional investments in the original auditorium and understandably regard Symphony Center with mixed feelings.
Because so many of the original building materials–rosettes, moldings and so forth–were destroyed in the renovation, Orchestra Hall could lose its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places and/or its status as a National Historic Landmark. A spokeswoman for the Historical Landmarks Program of the U.S. National Parks Service says she expects that a determination will be made once Symphony Center is up and running and parks service officials have had a chance to inspect the new auditorium interior.
It must be said that heroic efforts were made at every turn to preserve as much of the original facility as possible. Seim does admit, however, that in their zeal to give the project their best shot, some workers got overzealous.
Last April, Alfred Brendel’s piano recital was interrupted by the noise of demolition men drilling into a wall behind the stage–this despite the fact that all work crews were expressly ordered to be silent during concerts. Brendel was said to be livid and it took a formal apology from Fogel to placate him. Only two days earlier, pianist Krystian Zimerman complained to the audience at the start of his recital that frigid gusts from backstage–newly opened to the elements–were chilling his hands and making it difficult to play.
Those, fortunately, were the only snafus and they didn’t throw off the timetable.
For the final phase of the Orchestra Hall renewal, scaffolding was up and the interior ripped apart just days after the CSO’s final concert on the old Armour Stage on April 26. That was when the musicians gathered backstage for a final champagne toast to the old hall. They signed their names and left remembrances on the basement walls. Never mind that workers were poised to tear them down the following week: It was the sentiment that counted.
For his part, Barenboim says, “There’s no use being sentimental” about Orchestra Hall as it was–it’s time to move into the new century. “We will never know whether it was the right decision to rebuild Orchestra Hall or simply to have erected a new one,” he told a 1995 press conference announcing the renovation. Now, the music director says he’s overjoyed Chicago has a concert hall that promises to be “a little ahead of its time,” an expanded facility that will make the city “not only a great cultural center, but also a great educational center.”
What, then, of Fogel, without whose grandiose vision of the Chicago Symphony’s destiny–and, perhaps, his own–the project might never have made it past the wishful-thinking stage? The orchestra’s CEO exudes guarded optimism. But he also appreciates the enormous risks playing the $110-million poker game known as Symphony Center has involved.
“I think we’ve done everything we can to make it a facility the city can be proud of,” he says.
“Do I feel my own neck is on the line here? You bet. That’s my job. But I fully expect we are all going to feel the new hall will be a huge improvement.
“In my most optimistic moments, I think we are going to have one of the three or four truly great halls in America.
“That’s what I want.
“That’s what the orchestra deserves.”
THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY’S MANY NEW FACES
What was for decades one building owned and operated by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–Orchestra Hall–is now a complex of three buildings known collectively as Symphony Center. Here are some of the new features patrons can expect to find there:
Inside Orchestra Hall’s auditorium, listeners will find new, acoustically functional seats–2,522 of them, 58 fewer than in the old hall because of their added width. Two hundred of these seats will be terrace seats located behind the orchestra in an area formerly given over to risers for the CSO Chorus. The new terrace seating will afford a musician’s-eye-view of the conductor and soloists. Nobody knows yet what they will sound like.
The roof, once 8 feet above the proscenium arch that defines the performance space, has been raised to about 36 feet. This will give the hall almost 50 percent more volume–950,000 cubic feet–than before. (The ceiling, through which sound will pass on its way to the upper sound-reflecting cavity, will remain at its previous height.)
The hall’s Muller pipe organ, installed during the previous renovation in 1981, is being reconfigured for the new space by the Canadian organ-building firm of Cassavant Freres and won’t be reinstalled until next year. This season, all patrons will see are dummy organ pipes.
The former Chapin and Gore Building on Adams Street is now the Education and Administration Wing, housing a Welcome Center and a new public music learning center, the Eloise W. Martin Center–ECHO, for short–and a new restaurant, Rhapsody.
Designed for the average person who wants to learn more about music, ECHO will serve as hub for the CSO’s music education program. Rhapsody, whose chef is Steven Chiappetti, owner and chef of Chicago’s Mango restaurant, will seat 250 and include a glass-enclosed patio opening onto a green park planned for the corner of Adams Street and Wabash Avenue.
The Artistic Support Wing includes a new, 200-to-300-seat performance space/rehearsal facility, Buntrock Hall; the orchestra’s music library; rehearsal rooms and expanded instrument storage space.
The Arcade, separating Orchestra Hall from the Borg-Warner Building to the north and extending from Michigan Avenue on the east along Adams Street, will dramatically increase the public areas of Orchestra Hall. It was designed by project architect Joseph Gonzalez of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the clean postmodern style of the already renovated upper-floor foyers at the front of the hall. The arcade will allow easier access to seating on the main floor, box level, lower balcony, fourth, fifth and sixth floors.
A six-story atrium, the Rotunda, will link the three buildings as an integrated complex. The airy, sky-lit space, planned as a performance space for chamber music, is intended to direct audience members to the various levels of the North Arcade.
