It says a great deal about the impact Symphony Center is having on Chicago that lots of people are paying very close attention to the acoustical changes at Orchestra Hall, even those who aren’t diehard classical concertgoers. Everybody seems to have his or her passionate opinion, pro and con. The magnitude of the changes has guaranteed that; so does the fact that no two sets of ears perceive musical sound the same way. And, hey, it’s Chicago.
Well before Symphony Center made its debut last month, acoustical consultant R. Lawrence Kirkegaard made it plain that acoustical adjustments would be going on well after the revamped Orchestra Hall opened. True enough. He and his staff from Kirkegaard and Associates are still tinkering with the sound, even though the major elements of the acoustical redesign are in place and most people who know the hall, including the musicians of the Chicago Symphony, believe the sound has been significantly improved.
Kirkegaard has directed his acoustical adjustments to three areas: the generally conceded lack of adequate projection of high frequency sound, especially in the violins; and the uneven projection of solo instruments for patrons seated on the main floor and in the gallery. The hall’s decay time–the interval from when a note is sounded and when it disappears–is still rather short and needs to be boosted by about 10 percent. The acoustical consultant says he is confident these problems can be fixed. The target date for completion is mid-January, but he cautions that the process could take as long as a year.
With the early deadline in mind, Kirkegaard’s troubleshooters are hastening to complete their sealing of the sound-reflecting walls in the empty attic that was opened up between the roof of Orchestra Hall and the stage shell. When the hall opened Oct. 4, only some of the wall surfaces in that upper cavity had been sealed. “Upper string sound is still being chewed up in the attic space, because that space is thirsty for extreme high-frequency sound,” says the acoustician, who likens the effect to a “sonic skullcap” placed over the violins.
Efforts in recent weeks to finish the surfaces of the attic wall have been hampered by the fact that the hall has hosted some sort of musical or social event practically every day since its opening. Kirkegaard can only do his job (which includes taking electronic readings of the reverberation time) when the space is unoccupied and free of extraneous noise. That usually means setting up camp in the hall in the middle of the night.
As for the uneven projection of sound throughout the hall, he says the major culprit is the new acoustical canopy that floats above the stage. Although the canopy itself is anchored in place, the glass panels are adjustable. Kirkegaard’s plan is to move the front row of sound-reflecting panels downward to disperse sound-energy more evenly throughout the hall, especially to the main floor and gallery seats. Still the most satisfactory balance, blending and projection of instruments is reported by listeners in the first rows of the lower balcony.
To better reinforce the diffusion of high-string sound in other areas of the auditorium, wood panels have been added to the curved railings that define the sides of the new terrace seating behind the orchestra. To improve sonic presence in the gallery, the ceiling above that area will be overlaid with sound-diffusing four-inch-thick plaster. “This will make a big difference in what the gallery hears,” Kirkegaard says. Because the acoustician detected a slight echo in parts of the main floor, he is installing sound-absorbing felt strips over the plaster panels above the doorways at the sides of the hall.
For the first time since the notorious 1966 renovation dried out the sound, the hall can breathe. The acoustics now are able to expand for a big piece like the Beethoven Ninth Symphony or contract for a chamber ensemble like the Emerson Quartet. The new sound is a more faithful reflection of what makes the CSO distinctive among the great orchestras of the world. Initially the horn choir had trouble being heard, but now that Daniel Barenboim has moved the horns behind the woodwinds, they are projecting well. When the strings are playing at low or medium volume, you can now can hear more of their innate tonal quality that was for so long held hostage to the parched acoustics of the old Orchestra Hall.
But the fact that it’s a better hall also means it’s a more unforgiving hall.
No longer can sloppy attacks, poor ensemble and faulty intonation be blamed on the players’ inability to hear one another across the wide stage. When Barenboim failed to give the cellos a clear beat at their hushed statement of the “Ode to Joy” theme in the Beethoven Ninth at a recent gala, you heard the resulting train wreck all too painfully. When he failed to modulate dynamics or clarify the dense textures of Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, you knew at once that all was far from right. It should be obvious that a great concert hall is only as great as the taste and judgment of those who make music inside its hallowed walls.
Although Kirkegaard characterizes the sound of the new terrace seating tier as “interesting,” few music lovers who have heard concerts from those seats seem to be all that wild about the sound up there. Sitting in the tier behind the stage is fine, they report, if you’re dying to have a player’s-eye-view of the conductor’s smiles, grimaces and grunts. There is an extraordinary sense of physical intimacy with the sound source. But the sound is quirky and bears little relation to what one experiences in a normal concert-hall perspective.
This listener caught parts of both Maurizio Pollini’s piano recital and conductor Michael Gielen’s CSO concert from the terrace. With the lid of Pollini’s Steinway grand fully raised, the pianist sounded as if he were playing in Schaumburg. At the Gielen concert the orchestral soundstage was reversed from normal, creating a disorienting effect in works by Beethoven and Schubert: Cellos now on the left, violins on the right. When the timpani let loose in Beethoven’s third “Leonore” overture, you could feel the rumble under your feet. There was an excess of direct (as opposed to reflected) brass sound overbalancing the rest of the orchestra.
For solo recitals, Orchestra Hall has lost, for now, its former intimacy. Despite his skills, the Belgian baritone Jose van Dam could hardly create the illusion he was singing art songs in a proper recital hall–not when flanked by bare orchestra risers and a virtually empty terrace. One does not envy any artist’s having to communicate subtleties of music and text across so much barren space. When recitals are presented at Symphony Center, officials should consider putting a shell behind the performers and not selling any seats in the terrace.
The important thing, Kirkegaard says in defense of the design changes, is that Orchestra Hall now affords a vastly greater range of possibilities for self-improvement than ever before. “Now we are working from a high plateau to get into orbit, where before we had to scale mountains to get to that plateau.”
There is another factor to consider. We still do not have the full picture. How will visiting orchestras react to the new acoustical properties of Orchestra Hall? (The London Symphony Orchestra’s Sibelius symphony cycle next month should be a revealing litmus test.) Colleagues who have heard amplified pop and jazz events in the facility have written unfavorably about the sound. What adjustments can or should be made for such performances? We must wait and see. Barenboim himself told the subscribers as much from the stage at one of his first CSO concerts in the new facility.
Until we know more of the answers, all we can do is ask more questions and resist making hasty pronouncements. Chicago has a potentially fine concert hall–accent on the potentially. But we won’t be able to secure a verdict from the jury until the trial is over. And the trial could go on for a long time, as long as it takes to produce the Orchestra Hall that Orchestra Hall wants to be.
“Everybody connected with the Symphony Center project has an absolute commitment to finishing (it) as it was designed,” says Kirkegaard. “It really is only a matter of time. We are all going to have to be patient through the course of the season.”
