MUSIC REVIEW : Dallas Concert Hall Opens, Day Late and Dollar Short

Its 11-year gestation and 4-year construction spanned the terms of 4 mayors, 3 city managers and 7 city councils. Its initial price tag of $49.5 million was perhaps quadrupled by delays, conflicts, changes and cost overruns.

But Friday night the Dallas Symphony’s Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center opened with all the pomp and panoply demanded by high society in Big D.

Designed by famed architect I.M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson, the building is called the Meyerson Center because Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot said it would be. His $10-million gift required a commemoration to the chairman of the building committee and former president of Perot’s Electronic Data Systems. (Perot also was demanding his money back if the hall weren’t world-class enough!)

The Dallas Symphony hails it as a long-needed improvement over its previous performing home, but a former city councilman calls it “just a continuation of Dallas trying to buy some respectability.”

High point of a fortnight of celebration, Friday’s opening concert featured Mahler’s Second Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Texas’ favorite semiretired native son, Van Cliburn.

The sound produced by the Dallas Symphony under Eduardo Mata, its music director since 1977, was bright but not strident, warm if not mellow. A bit harsh at high volume, the violins were silken in quiet passages. The lower strings boasted assertive resonance. The brasses blared keenly but not fiercely, and they didn’t swamp the woodwinds.

Cliburn’s poetic but sometimes startlingly inaccurate playing projected forcefully, and the hall proved very flattering to voices in the Mahler Second. The Dallas Symphony Chorus sang with both power and textural clarity, and even the quietest tones produced by contralto Maureen Forrester and soprano Sylvia McNair sailed out into the auditorium with arresting ease and presence.

The hall is located on 260,000 square feet of land in the Arts District, 60 downtown acres that also contain the Dallas Museum of Art and a Dallas Theater Center satellite space. The Meyerson Center is a rectangle--the Eugene McDermott Concert Hall--sitting at an angle inside a square girdled by segments of a circle. Three of the artificially aged limestone walls boast curved roof-line windows called “lenses” but nicknamed “eyebrows.”

Sweeping around the building is the “conoid,” a dramatic arc of glass that covers the restaurant space on the west side and has 211 computer-designed panes, no two of which are the same size. Venetian blindlike sunscreens made of one-inch aluminum tubing dim the daytime glare but still allow nighttime concertgoers to gaze out at the Dallas skyline. The high-ceilinged lobby is spacious and pleasant. But thanks to the Italian marble walls and floors, it’s also as noisy as a tiled locker room.

The McDermott Concert Hall seats only 2,065. But 200 or more of those seats, perched behind the orchestra, are designed for use by choristers and can’t be sold when the program requires a choir. This makes the McDermott an unusually small American auditorium. Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Vienna’s Musikvereinssaal, the halls most admired by the team that selected Pei and Johnson, contain fewer than 1,700 seats, but Carnegie Hall holds 2,727 and Boston’s Symphony Hall 2,631.

The seats themselves are rust-colored (the socialite next to me thought in a certain light they looked mauve). A one-time fee of $10,000 and a ticket to each concert gets you a seat in one of the 18 boxes. Friday night, a bejeweled box holder, obviously new to such elite concert accommodations, was overheard asking an usher where her booth was.

Shoebox-shaped, 85 feet high and nicely intimate, the auditorium is dressy, appointed with brass railings, marble banisters and onyx sconces. It is also “live,” as you might expect given the lack of carpet on the terrazzo floors. But many items were built in to warm and “tune” the hall.

The most dramatic and controversial of these is the 42-ton, four-part, steel and wood acoustic canopy that hovers over the stage and several rows of seats. Not operable until January 1993, when the 4,463-pipe Fisk organ will also be dedicated, it can be hydraulically raised, lowered or tilted, affecting how sound is projected into the auditorium.

Also included to enhance the acoustics are cherry wood panels on the concrete-block walls, 62 adjustable acoustical curtains, an L-shaped hollow space under the stage to boost the resonance of the cellos and double basses, and 72 concrete doors.

These doors, some of them weighing 2.5 tons each, control the flow of sound in and out of the 30-foot-deep reverberation chamber that extends around the top level of the hall.

Tired of the way the size (3,420 seats) and fan-shape of its previous home, the Fair Park Music Hall, dulled its sound, the Dallas Symphony decided to build itself a new home way back in 1978. A bond election that year failed, but a 1982 vote was “aye” and ground was broken in 1985.

Pei, 72, is famous for the John F. Kennedy Library in Cambridge, Mass., the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington and the remodeling of the Louvre in Paris. He is infamous in Dallas for being six years late and $14 million over budget when building City Hall in the 1960s. Nonetheless, he was hired to design his first-ever concert hall and Russell Johnson was named the acoustician. They, and their consultants, received fees of $9.9 million and $1.5 million, respectively.

The price of the hall kept rising as Texas’ oil-driven economy kept sinking. The cost of construction ultimately hit $81.5 million.

But the tariff swells to $106.4 million--shared $56.2 million to $50.2 million by the city and the Dallas Symphony Assn.--when you add the land, the organ, the underground garage, an adjacent park, a commemorative entrance arch and sculpture (Eduardo Chillida’s “De Musica”) and the overtime costs to finish the acoustic canopy.

Factor in financing charges and a parking garage for concert-goers and the tab balloons to just under $200 million.

Until August, 1993, when the Symphony Assn.’s final payments are due, Big D will stand for Big Debt.