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
I was present on Oct. 4, 1997, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave its first public concert at a shiny new Orchestra Hall after the most extensive overhaul in the auditorium’s history. The property at Michigan and Adams was transformed into the $110-million cultural shopping mall known as Symphony Center.
At that concert, music director Daniel Barenboim told the audience, “It was not enough that the hall be made a little bit better. It had to be a lot better to be worthy of this orchestra and this city.”
I agreed. “The Chicago Symphony now sounds more like the tonally magnificent ensemble we know from its tour concerts in the great halls of the world,” I wrote in review. “It’s a sound the Chicago Symphony, and all of Chicago, can live with for many, many seasons to come.”
I was wrong.
After hundreds of concerts heard from various locations in the reconfigured auditorium, to my ears the acoustics are worse for symphonic music in the 2,310-seat auditorium than before Symphony Center went up. (Solo recitals and chamber music sound as good, if not better, than before the 1997 renovation.)
I write this today with regret and even sorrow as one who has come to regard Orchestra Hall almost as his second home in Chicago, even though it’s a home I confess I can barely recognize.
For a while following the center’s splashy black-tie inaugural, I was optimistic the newly bass-enriched, but unbalanced and inconsistent, sound could and would be improved by the acoustical fine-tuning that has gone on more or less continuously since the center opened its doors. I’m still waiting for those long-promised improvements.
Short of gutting the auditorium and starting over — as the New York Philharmonic again is planning to do with the 40-year-old, acoustically troubled Avery Fisher Hall, as part of a massive makeover that is expected to cost just under $400 million — will the CSO ever have a first-class hall “worthy of this orchestra and this city”?
The questions come more readily than the answers.
It was mainly to improve the dry resonance, make the sound quality less variable from location to location, and help the orchestra players hear one another better across the wide stage, that the CSO undertook its extensive, multiyear expansion of a cramped, aging facility built in 1904, only seven years after the death of Brahms.
A situation of tradeoffs
The problem, as hindsight tells me, is that the Chicago Symphony management, in its zeal to rejuvenate the auditorium, either went too far or not far enough. Consider the following tradeoffs made from 1997 to the present:
A hall originally intended only as a symphonic auditorium now was turned into a multipurpose facility that bears little resemblance, physically, aesthetically or practically, to the hall CSO founder Theodore Thomas envisioned. Even with more dressing room and rehearsal space, this has left a lot of CSO members to conclude that the hall is no longer really theirs, because it is no longer exclusively about them or their music.
Drastically reconfiguring the hall interior and the space above the stage and adding an acoustical canopy to focus the sound have robbed the upper strings of shimmer and warmth even as they added depth and spaciousness to the low frequency sound, flattering the cellos and basses.
Putting the players up on risers to improve sightlines and stripping the stage enclosure of the perforated metal panels believed to have misdirected onstage sound have left the players unable to hear one another properly, uncertain about how their sound fits into the general sonic mass.
Adding 200 chairs in a new terrace seating area behind and above the stage has given some listeners a theater-in-the-round vantage point but has created perhaps the worst sonic environment in which to experience orchestral sound at Orchestra Hall.
To be sure, even after the ill-fated renovation of 1966, and its 1967 followup, the auditorium was always clear and well-balanced for orchestral sound. It was nothing like that following the 1997 renovation. If anything, orchestra sound at Orchestra Hall is now more unforgiving and harder for musicians to manage than perhaps ever before.
That sound cannot, of course, be separated from the music and the conditions under which music is made. Barenboim may try to secure a more string-based sound from his orchestra, but the hall’s as-yet limited high-frequency response and the stentorian power built into the musical DNA of the orchestra’s brass section thus far have largely negated his attempts to find a proper balance.
For many listeners, the upper strings lack shimmer and warmth opposite the newfound thumping presence of the lower strings, trombones and tuba. Orchestral sonorities, as sampled from many different locations throughout the auditorium, no longer envelop the listener as they once did. Now the effect is rather like listening to a monaural recording through average playback equipment — the sound-picture flat and cramped.
Because the acoustical makeover didn’t correct enough of the old problems, and created new ones, the orchestra management announced in October that it would seek a second opinion as to how these problems might be fixed.
A sound decision
CSO Association President Henry Fogel, having repeatedly pronounced the sonic overhaul a success, now admits “we have not adequately addressed” the flawed sound on stage and the dearth of high frequency sound energy in the room.
And so he has engaged the well-known acoustician Russell Johnson, of Artec Consultants, to scope out the auditorium this winter and make recommendations after the end of the season while R. Lawrence Kirkegaard of Kirkegaard and Associates, whose expertise drove the sonic remake of the hall, remains the primary acoustical consultant.
Johnson has a solid track record, having made an acoustical success of such modern auditoriums as Dallas’ Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Hall and Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England. Thus far, however, reactions to the sound of his latest creation, Verizon Hall — the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new, 2,500-seat home in the $265 million Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 2001 — have fluctuated wildly between those who like it and those who hate it. Johnson is still working to bring the acoustics up to par (sound familiar?).
Meanwhile, Fogel has signed off on the public portion of the hall’s acoustical fine-tuning, saying that, “from the audience chamber, Orchestra Hall ranks as one of the finer concert rooms of the world.” A CEO charged with eliminating the orchestra’s $6.1 million deficit before his retirement in June 2003 clearly has more pressing concerns than making the sound more agreeable for patrons who may not notice any difference, or care.
Yet within the Chicago Symphony family and in the outside world there remain differences of opinion as to how severe and/or localized the hall’s acoustical ailments really are.
Barenboim stands by his original verdict but now has his own reservations.
“I think the renovated Orchestra Hall is already an improvement [and that] the last five years have brought additional improvements,” he says. But, “I am not convinced that the optimal conditions have been achieved, and this is what we hope to do now.”
When the Cleveland Orchestra appeared here in October, one of its musicians drew an unflattering comparison with the sonic warmth and transparency of that orchestra’s handsomely restored auditorium, the venerable Severance Hall. The onstage acoustics here are “terrible,” the player said.
Kirkegaard agrees the sound on the CSO’s Armour Stage remains flawed. “This isn’t as exciting or rewarding a place for performers to perform as it could be,” he says. When it was pointed out to him that this wasn’t the case prior to the most recent renovation, he agreed. “To find a way back closer to what they experienced before would be a goal for us.”
To that end, the Chicago-based acoustician and his team have done everything from refining the sound-diffusing materials in the sound chamber above the stage to adjusting the auditorium’s humidification system. Yet a symphonic sound that is pleasing to everyone remains elusive.
Blaming Barenboim
A number of players have laid some of their frustrations over the hall’s sound at Barenboim’s feet. Some have long complained about the deliberate vagueness of his beat, which even Fogel has admitted makes it more difficult to play with precision on a stage as acoustically problematic as ours. In recent years musicians have been grumbling about the music director’s seating plan, which in itself makes it hard for some players to establish aural contact with one another, they say.
“We cannot hear the second violins at all on the other side of the stage,” says a CSO violinist who did not wish to be identified. “With their sound holes pointing to the back of the stage, they are completely inconsequential sonically, and the lower strings are even louder than before. Until [management builds] a solid ceiling above the orchestra, it’ll never be right, regardless of what they try to do about the sound.” (Creating more hard reflective surfaces in the acoustical crown over the stage is one of Kirkegaard’s more recent proposals.)
But Barenboim defends his distribution of the players. “The stage arrangement I employ is for me a musical necessity,” he replies. “It allows for the sound of the violins to come from the whole width of the stage when they play in unison or octaves. The cellos and basses next to the first violins give a greater contact between treble and bass that is to the advantage of the general sound of the first violins.
“This seating requires certain adaptations in what the players hear closest to them, and this adaptation has been very successful. When the necessary additional improvements in the acoustics take place, the audience will, obviously, also benefit.”
Orchestra patrons have heard such promises before.
From a historical perspective, the oddly shaped auditorium that has been home to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for nearly a century always was considered a good, not great, concert auditorium. It never was an acoustical dud like most of the concert halls built since World War II. While far from an acoustical marvel such as Symphony Hall, Boston or New York’s Carnegie Hall, Orchestra Hall satisfied the expectations of listeners who favor symphonic sound that is direct, immediate and in their faces.
Yet its unique curvilinear design always posed severe difficulties for the production and experiencing of sound. When fully occupied, the hall was less reverberant than the classical rectangular auditoriums of Europe. At least five previous attempts were made to improve the acoustics, none entirely successful.
Feelings of intimacy
For all that, generations of concertgoers have admired the intimacy of the place, some of whose seats are closer to the stage than in any major orchestra hall in the world. The sound of Orchestra Hall long has been the sound listeners everywhere associate with Chicago Symphony through concerts, recordings and radio broadcasts (when the orchestra was still broadcasting, that is).
The sentimental affection in which so many Chicagoans — audience members and musicians alike — held the old Orchestra Hall was one of the reasons why the CSO trustees rejected an initial proposal to build an entirely new performing arts center to house the CSO and Lyric Opera. It’s also why some people opposed any changes being made to the hall’s interior.
But the preservationists’ protests went unheeded. Fogel and the trustees forged ahead with their grand expansion plan, effectively giving the architect, Joe Gonzalez of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, more or less a free hand to turn a National Historic Landmark into something almost entirely changed from what it was. Thus, much of what Orchestra Hall long represented was bulldozed over by progress.
The consequences of those decisions are what the Chicago community must live with for decades to come — until a modern Maecenas comes along to build a better, and better-sounding, concert hall.
Rather than calling the “new” sound of Orchestra Hall flawed, as does Fogel, Kirkegaard describes it as “in need of improvement.” But more improvements will cost more money and Fogel hesitates to speculate where, in the present economic climate, the Chicago Symphony will find several million dollars for additional sound-tuning beyond the $120 million it already has poured into Symphony Center.
When pressed, Kirkegaard cautions patrons not to expect any dramatic improvements in what they hear, even as the orchestra begins soliciting a second opinion as to the sound. “This will never be a space with sumptuous reverberation in which you can bathe — that’s not in the bones of the building,” he says.
“I wish there were simple solutions.”
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– A dry, acoustically patchy hall is now starved of the high frequency sound energy that allows violins to shimmer.
– Symphony musicians can’t hear themselves, or blend easily with colleagues.
– The cellos, double basses and lower brass are now shoved so aggressively in one’s face that the orchestra sounds unbalanced, bottom-heavy.
