‘A Fabulous Hall’ : From Stage to Sound, Ambassador Meets Every Need

The stage looks warm and intimate, with russet wood walls and a piano gleaming in a pool of light. In 45 minutes, veteran concert pianist Eugene Istomin will walk to the piano and fill the Ambassador Auditorium with nimble-fingered trills and runs in a program of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin.

Mark Morris, performance stage manager, gives stage and empty seats a critical once-over. “After the concert, this will all be just an empty, hollow space,” he said. “I’m always amazed at it.”

From the outside, the Ambassador in Pasadena is the Rock of Gibraltar of concert halls. Columns, square cornices and a flat half-acre of a roof give it a solid, monumental look. But inside the hall, the Ambassador can be as changeable as an itinerant swap meet.

In minutes, acoustic panels can be tucked away, banks of curtains hauled into place, batteries of spotlights switched on or off, rows of seats added or subtracted.

Administering a major concert hall such as the Ambassador, which began a cultural boom in Pasadena when it opened in 1974, is a theatrical roller coaster. Few handle the curves as well as the Ambassador staff, visiting artists have said.

“A fabulous hall, the best that money can buy,” flamboyant Yugoslav pianist Ivo Pogorelich told an interviewer, “and there’s a lot of money in Pasadena.”

There are 100 or more events in the hall’s nine-month season. Piano soloists give way to jazz bands, chamber orchestras follow on the heels of pop singers. Each event has its own peculiar staging requirements.

Take the hall’s convertible acoustics. The crisp, brilliant sound that the Ambassador’s house staff has programmed for Istomin’s lyrical piano pieces won’t work for the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, the big band scheduled to play in the hall the next evening.

“With all of that sound bouncing around the room, it would start coming back to the microphones,” said Peter Eddington, the Ambassador’s technical and lighting supervisor. “After a while, it starts sounding like you’re in a toilet bowl.”

To “deaden” to sound, the Ambassador staff will fold away the teak sidewalls, remove the gold-leaf-covered acoustical panels (the “gold clouds”) that hang above the piano and swath the stage in black curtains.

“With the piano, the hall approaches about two seconds of reverberation time,” Eddington said. “For a big band, you want to get below one second.”

Every Monday morning, the house staff gets together in the orchestra of the 1,262-seat hall to work out technical requirements for the week’s events.

Last week’s events began with an opera-in-concert on Monday, complete with orchestra, chorus and soloists. That was followed by the Istomin recital on Wednesday and the jazz concert on Thursday. The cycle ends tonight with a performance by Mummenschanz, the Swiss mime, dance and puppetry troupe.

Each event requires radical restructuring of the Ambassador stage.

On Wednesday morning, lighting technicians tinker with some spotlights as Istomin, a studious-looking man in wire-rimmed glasses, rehearses a Beethoven sonata, his fingers ruminatively exploring a dense adagio passage.

The challenge for the concert pianist, Istomin said, is conveying a 19th-Century composer’s intent while performing in a 20th-Century concert hall. “All of these pieces were written to be played in a place which was about one-quarter the size of this hall,” Istomin said. “There are subtleties--perfumes--that can only be communicated through a kind of stage whisper.”

Eddington is gratified to hear Istomin talking about music instead of staging. “When he walks onto the stage,” Eddington said, “there should be nothing to worry about as far as the facility or the crew are concerned. He should only worry about the piece of music.”

The Ambassador is run by the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation, an arm of the Worldwide Church of God. Ambassador College, on whose elegant Pasadena campus the concert hall sits, is another arm of the church. The church plans to relocate the college later this year to another facility in Texas.

But there’s no way that the church would give up this gem, church officials say. In just 16 years of operation, the hall brims with musical lore. Here’s the backstage elevator that was installed ahead of schedule so that Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti wouldn’t have to climb the 28 stairs from dressing room to stage level. “He said that climbing the stairs would interrupt his breathing patterns,” Snyder said.

An electric eye was subsequently installed in the elevator so Mstislav Rostropovich wouldn’t worry that his cello would be smashed by the closing door.

Here and there are some extraordinary features of the edifice itself, including its pinkish lobby walls, from basement to balcony, which used up Turkey’s entire export quota of rose onyx for a year.

“Even that much wasn’t quite enough,” Snyder said, pointing to a single six-foot panel of grayish marble at the balcony level.

By early evening, the recital shell is in place and lights are set for the performance. Istomin arrives, tense and unsmiling in a black tuxedo. He tells technicians not to turn on the “bow lights” when he walks on stage.

“I don’t want any spots on me, none of that show biz stuff,” said Istomin, who has been performing since 1943. “Make it boring. The glamour should take place in the sound.”

A warmly appreciative audience, marveling at Istomin’s light-fingered facility at the keyboard, applauds enthusiastically and demands two encores. As audience members trickle away into the night, Morris and three assistants begin to strip the stage.

The teak walls, folded up into five panels, are winched toward the ceiling, 60 feet above the stage. There’s a loft full of catwalks and folded equipment up there--a dark, cavernous space hidden from the audience by slatted ceiling panels--that is almost as big as the performance hall itself.

The golden clouds are lowered to the stage, turned on their sides and hauled up; the same with banks of lights. Each piece of movable equipment is counterbalanced with lead weights, so that stage assistants can move them up or down just by pulling on ropes.

In just 41 minutes, the four men have stripped the stage. The next day, rows of black curtains would be lowered into place, putting the stage into what is called a “theater black” mode, and risers and microphones would be installed for the jazz band.

But for now, the stage is just a forlorn, empty space, waiting for technology and magic to convert it into a place where musicians can somehow be intimate with a crowd of more than 1,200 strangers.