CHAMBER MUSIC FILLING VOID LEFT BY SYMPHONY

During this season of symphonic discontent, chamber music is thriving in San Diego. Since last fall, both the La Jolla Chamber Music Society and the San Diego Chamber Orchestra have been selling out their Sherwood Auditorium concerts with apparent ease. The La Jolla organization’s celebrity series at Symphony Hall has become the hottest ticket around. Now another group is bidding for a piece of the action.

Silver Gate Concerts, however, is armed with a gimmick, albeit a respectable one. With the assistance of San Diego’s Save Our Heritage Organisation, each concert will be played in a historically significant building, beginning Sunday with a duo recital in National City’s restored 1898 Granger Music Hall.

Based on the success of similar series in other cities, Silver Gate organizers Betty McManus and Lynn Schubert decided to offer four monthly recitals at four different sites. Pianist McManus had performed chamber music in historic buildings in Savannah, Ga., where she lived before moving to San Diego.

“Of course, Savannah is one big historic district,” said McManus, “and while San Diego is not Savannah, I think we’ve just scratched the surface here.”

In addition to Granger Music Hall, McManus and Schubert have lined up the Congregational Church of La Jolla, a 1916 wooden-beamed chapel designed by Carleton Winslow, architect of the 1915 Exposition buildings in Balboa Park; the music room of John D. Spreckels’ 1910 Edwardian Coronado mansion, now the Glorietta Bay Inn, and the Moot Court of downtown San Diego’s 1930 Elks Hall, now the home of California Western School of Law.

Working on this project has turned McManus into an architectural sleuth.

“I go around and look at ceilings a lot,” she said. “We’re not interested solely in historical significance, though. We hope to find other places--lobbies of buildings and penthouses--where people would just come to enjoy the music.”

Flutist Lynn Schubert, who will perform Baroque music with the Early Music Academy on the March 15 program in La Jolla, recalled her musical experiences while growing up in Akron, Ohio. “In a Tudor mansion built by local tire magnates, I regularly attended chamber music concerts in its beautiful music salon,” she said. “Chamber music belongs in places like that, rather than in huge auditoriums.”

“The room has to be the right size,” McManus said. “I want to see the players’ eyeballs, hear them breathe, and watch them signal each other while they play. A room needs to give a sense of immediacy.”

While Granger Music Hall, which seats 175 people, is one of the larger sites chosen for the new series, it is a direct link to San Diego’s turn-of-the-century music culture. The frame hall was built for silver baron Ralph Granger, who amassed his fortune from the Colorado “Last Chance” silver mine.

“The hall began in 1896 as a room to display Granger’s collection of fine string instruments, which included a Stradivarius violin,” National City Historical Society Vice President Tom Carnes said. “In 1898, Granger hired architect Irving Gill to expand it into a concert hall.”

The historical society now owns and operates the hall, which was nearly demolished in the early 1970s after years of neglect and accidental fires set by transients. According to Carnes, National City Mayor George Waters, then a city council member, marshaled civic pride and the requisite financing to save and restore the hall.

Sunday’s program at Granger Music Hall will feature, appropriately, a violinist, Kay Newnam, concertmaster of the Orchestra of Santa Fe (New Mexico), accompanied by pianist Karen Follingstad of the San Diego State University music faculty. Their 3 p.m. recital will include sonatas by J.S. Bach, Faure, Franz Schubert and Copland.

Lynn Schubert said that, with a single exception, their performance proposals were met with enthusiasm. “All the spaces for the concerts have been donated,” she added.

Other historical sites Schubert and McManus are eyeing for future programs include the Mission San Diego de Alcala and the Villa Montezuma, a Victorian mansion in Golden Hill that is being restored by the San Diego Historical Society after a fire last year.