Earlier this fall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced it had hired a second firm to help improve the sound at the renovated Orchestra Hall. That move reignited an ongoing, often heated discussion among three Chicago Tribune critics, who among them have been attending shows at Orchestra Hall for more than 95 seasons. In varying degrees, they were unhappy with what they heard at concerts by the CSO and visiting performers since the hall was retooled in 1997.
It wasn’t usually the musicians they were complaining about, it was how Orchestra Hall now made them sound.
Why does this matter?
Orchestra Hall, it can be easily argued, is the heart of cultural Chicago, home not only to the CSO, which carries the city’s reputation with it around the world, but also is the stage where artists come to perform and take their experiences with them.
Essentially, a performance hall is like a stereo system. As the old Memorex TV commercials suggested, good sound reproduction has a tremendous impact on our listening experience. In a hall, the surfaces, distances, plumbing and electronics all come together to affect and project sounds like our amplifier and speakers do at home (where the shape, size and furniture in our listening rooms influence sounds).
Good sound is highly personal, as demonstrated by the dozens and dozens of choices of stereo systems in every price range. When we hear a great orchestra in a hall that diminishes sound, we may leave thinking we heard a good performance, but wonder why it wasn’t great. Critics, who also experience these subtle but important deficiencies, can help us understand why.
In the discussions here, which also include CSO officials, sound consultants and performers, we tried to find out why the sound at Orchestra Hall has gotten worse since the 1997 renovation. Exactly how bad and why was at the core of our conversations, ones that we share with you in this special report.
— Scott L. Powers, Entertainment Editor
Forty years ago next February I attended my first concert in Orchestra Hall, sitting in one of the cheapest and best seats, in the gallery. The warm enveloping sound there had so strong an impact that I wanted it to be a regular part of my life. So I began to usher at concerts and eventually was helped by CSO music director Jean Martinon to hear nearly every one — each program and all the repeats — for four years. Thereafter, I have attended weekly for the last three decades.
I didn’t know how lucky I was to have become acquainted with the orchestra in the early ’60s. The sound of the hall changed in 1966 because of a renovation that promised to take an acoustically good room and make it great. The failure was so massive that rescue efforts have been ongoing. The biggest one came five years ago, giving some improvement but bringing so many new problems that it has to be judged a debacle.
Why should anyone care? Casual listeners are so impressed by the amount of sound coming from a live orchestra that they seldom notice the quality of it. Listeners who go to five or six concerts a season — as many subscribers do these days — aren’t in the hall often enough to make fine distinctions. Besides, people attend concerts for many reasons, not all musical, almost none acoustical.
But in an expressive sense, the sound you hear is the music. Soft, caressing tone gives a different impression than hard, abrasive tone. Each section of players — strings, winds, brasses, percussion — can create a range of tone by themselves and in combination with others. Kind and balance of tone affect the characterization of music, as does the listening environment.
Great halls project many kinds of tone from players to audience, sustaining or clipping them as the music requires, with minimal distortion. Such rooms are in short supply: Symphony Hall in Boston, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Musikverein in Vienna. They are the envy of hall managers everywhere. That has been part of the trouble here.
“Orchestra Hall always seemed to have its shortcomings,” said Tim Samuelson, cultural historian of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. “A study was made by John Eifler, an architect now in independent practice, when he was with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill [the firm that carried out the 1997 renovation]. It presented complaints about acoustics from the very beginning.”
A solution was supposed to have been given by Louis Sullivan, who allegedly said, “What would be the cost of six sticks of dynamite?” But Frank Lloyd Wright recounted — or invented — that almost 50 years after Sullivan was asked to evaluate the hall, and according to Sullivan’s reliable assistant, George Grant Elmslie, “no specific report seems to have been made.” Still, the remark, along with many less drastic, has continued to exaggerate the hall’s shortcomings and bolster each attempt at making it “great.”
The gallery sound
How did the hall sound prior to ’66? I found it full and spacious no matter where the seat, except for the rear of the main floor and upper balcony, where the overhang of boxes and gallery cut down on impact. But in intervening years, management said so much about deficiencies that I started to distrust the memory of my experience and questioned others who had heard the hall, onstage and off, for a longer period.
“The best sound we had was when I came to the orchestra [49 years ago],” said Victor Aitay, violinist and former CSO concertmaster. “The reverberation was perfect. We all heard each other on the stage wonderfully. Sound quality was beautiful. I don’t believe the hall only was good when empty, for recording. No. If it was good for recording — and we made fine recordings there — it was good for concerts.”
“When I arrived as assistant first oboe [in 1953],” said Ray Still, former principal oboe, “I didn’t play very much. I’d run up the stairs to the gallery and was very impressed with how intimate and clear the sound was. There were some strange spots. When the hall became quite dry, the left front of the balcony was dead. But that was later. Of course, [music director Fritz] Reiner had a great ear for clarity and balance. It’s amazing how much sound can vary according to who’s doing the balancing.”
Audiotape bears witness
A tape made on April 15, 1963, confirms that. Erich Leinsdorf, a musician much concerned with balance, brought the Boston Symphony to Chicago at the end of his first season as music director. WFMT broadcast the concert live. When reminded of its fine tone quality even in monaural sound, former program director Norman Pellegrini recently said: “Well, that probably was the orchestra,” which brought its home sonority to a hall Pellegrini always had found “laserlike and dry.”
The hall became significantly drier in ’66, partly owing to opening up the ceiling to a cavity above. The space was supposed to increase the hall’s sound-reflecting area, bringing reverberation time more in line with that of the great venues of the world. The opposite happened. Grilles replaced solid surfaces above the stage. Sound went up into the cavity and stayed.
“There are early, middle and late sound reflections in any hall,” said Mitchell G. Heller, who began recording the CSO for broadcast in 1969. “Orchestra Hall lacked the first of these, the early returns that mix sounds giving a sense of space, distance, size and depth. The original design of the hall didn’t allow many early returns. After 1966 there was an even longer path to the ceiling.”
Old-fashioned music directors, ones who worked with their orchestras for most of each season, found ways around acoustical deficiencies. Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy both created a lush orchestral sound in the refractory Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Riccardo Muti, who succeeded Ormandy and stayed for many fewer weeks each year, attempted to impose a sound the hall did not agreeably sustain. His solution was to insist on building a new hall.
The bigger picture
Something similar happened in Chicago. Martinon, who favored lightness and transparency, achieved it before and after the renovation. Then came Georg Solti, whose clean, thrustful, rhythmic approach to music also succeeded in the acoustic, necessitating no major changes. But minor ones were introduced in 1980 and 1981, and Still recalls Solti seeking a richer, sweeter string tone, which consistently eluded him.
Was that a failure of the hall? Some wanted us to think so. However, for more than a decade guest conductor Carlo Maria Giulini had the orchestra sounding warm and mellow — just what the hall was said not to permit — and so, to a lesser degree, did former music director Rafael Kubelik when he returned as a guest. The notion that the hall had to be radically altered to achieve a smooth, molded sound came only with the regime of music director Daniel Barenboim.
Then there was another new idea.
“When Skidmore was brought in 10 years ago,” said Heller, “they talked to [us] sound engineers and I suspected they were aiming at a multipurpose acoustic to handle diverse performances. They knew the hall would have to be used for rentals. But longer reverberation time and early reflections are not compatible with jazz, pop and rock shows, which are amplified, punchier and drier. It was an acoustic compromise.”
The acoustics of Orchestra Hall were, in fact, only one factor in a larger plan. Symphony Center, a complex of offices, rehearsal rooms, archives, recording studio, education space, store, restaurant and club, proceeded in tandem. Planners were not embarrassed by grandiosity or slowed by self-doubt.
But back to the hall: “None of us had a free hand,” said acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard. “The bones of the building were from 100 years ago. The [Chicago] orchestra wasn’t as big then. To meet the [personnel] needs of late-Romantic repertory, the stage had to be enlarged. There also had to be seating behind the orchestra to pick up seats lost in the hall because of widened aisles for audience comfort.”
Visual vs. aural benefits
Is it just a coincidence that the Philharmonie in Berlin, a modern hall that Barenboim loves, has seating behind the orchestra? Certainly, other changes in Chicago — lowering of the stage, raising of a new reflector ring, introduction of new risers for players, heightening of the conductor’s podium — brought greater visual than aural benefit.
A clear frontal view of the conductor is actually the sole benefit of sitting behind the orchestra, as the sound is projected away from you and instrumental choirs are heard in reverse order, percussion and brass first, strings last.
Reverberation has improved slightly, thanks to an even larger cavity housing heating and air conditioning that audibly grinds above the ceiling. But the hall is still drier than before ’66, and there remains a shortage of early reflections that give sound its quality. Instead, reflectors above and around the room direct sound erratically, causing variations in the character of tone between each section of seating as well as within the section. There is, for example, no uniform lower balcony sound. Dead spots, exaggerated upper frequencies or bizarrely spotlighted projection may be found within two or three rows of each other.
The main floor and upper balcony, each under its respective overhang, continue to be worlds unto themselves. However, reflections now are so unpredictable that the main floor rear sounds more refined than anywhere closer to the stage and the back of the gallery — once the most sound-drenched spot in the auditorium — has firm, rounded tone coming from only in front of listeners and very far away.
Barenboim has responded to some of the peculiarities by changing the seating plan of the orchestra, but oddly enough, he may not be in the best position to make a judgment.
“It used to be said the podium was the most difficult place from which to hear,” Still said. Pellegrini agreed: “The sound immediately around the podium I suspect is a dead spot.”
Is this why Barenboim has moved his podium farther into the orchestra, cramping the cellos between him and the winds he brought forward?
“The stage is not throwing out sound, is it?” asked Donald Peck, former principal flute who frequently returns to the hall as a listener. “The setup Barenboim likes may not be the way it should be. Sound is dull. Tone doesn’t have clarity or point. You often can’t pick out the pitch, and that makes everything difficult to hear.”
Peck recalled how decades ago principal cellist Frank Miller proposed putting a shell over the orchestra to increase the hall’s reflective surfaces. Nobody listened. In the years since, management removed shaped plywood seats in the upper balcony and gallery and replaced leather seat coverings with velour while adding thicker carpet runners. The result was a decrease of reflective surfaces with an infinitesimal increase in comfort and a substantial gain to what Still calls “the really gauche-looking decoration.”
No going back
Now, after structural changes that Kirkegaard said are “architecturally irreversible,” attempts apparently are going forward to do what always should have been done: reclaim as much of the pre-1966 Orchestra Hall sound as possible. But walls have been moved and so much of the original interior destroyed that “fine tuning” cannot do it.
A 1950 celebration of Chicago’s Auditorium included the following: “Some experts say the perfection of its acoustics is due partly to the structural lines of the interior, but more particularly to the fact that the plaster was meticulously applied, each layer being allowed to dry perfectly before another was added.”
The interior of today’s Orchestra Hall has neither its original structural lines nor its plaster.
What happened there is shown more clearly at the top of the building in the club that used to be the Cliff Dwellers. It had a 1908 interior by Howard Van Doren Shaw that was torn out and replaced by a contemporary interior said to be in Shaw’s spirit.
Is everybody happy?
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– The string tone in the front of the main floor or balcony screeches whenever the first violin section plays loudly.
– From the front of the main floor or balcony, there is not a precise placement of sound from the stage or during solos.
– A distancing on the main floor locates the brasses and tympani far behind the orchestra and slightly muffles them.
