Chicago’s Center Is a Treat for the Ears

When the new millennium dawns, music lovers across the land will be greeting it (if all goes well, and especially as well as it has already in Chicago) with happy new ears. New concert halls are being built in record numbers (even Disney Hall is supposed to be completed the millennium’s official start year, 2001). Old ones (and not-so-old ones) are being renovated. Call it the acoustification of America.

Just this fall, alone, Newark has inaugurated its $180-million New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco and the orchestra hall of the Kennedy Center in Washington have reopened after multimillion-dollar overhauls. And the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has spent $110 million to convert its 93-year-old Orchestra Hall into Symphony Center.

Orchestra Hall was never a terrible theater. The building is handsome, in that sturdy, can-do spirit of turn-of-the-century Chicago. Across the street from the Art Institute, it is where a symphony hall should be.

Acoustically the place was, maybe, a bit peculiar. Its approximately 2,500 seats fanned a large stage under a dome, rather than following the more common and more acoustically reliable shoe-box design. It made for an unusual feeling of intimacy with the stage, as well as an immediacy of sound. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is a brass-blazing band, not unlike the city it serves, and it knew how to get the most acoustic juice from its bright hall.

But there were problems. The sound could be brittle and shallow. Chicago musicians are finicky, as well. The orchestra complained when it couldn’t hear itself. But it also complained when it could--the strings insisted on being shielded from that famous brass with Plexiglass screens.

My experience with the Chicago Symphony in Orchestra Hall, during annual visits over the last few years to hear principal guest conductor Pierre Boulez, has been generally positive. From a good seat in the lower balcony, the sound of the orchestra, under Boulez, revealed lots of color and detail and tonal focus.

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Even so, the new Symphony Center, which opened in early October with gala concerts, is, as they say, a whole new ball game. Heard last week, again from the lower balcony (still the favored location, I’m told), but this time under an erratic conductor, Leif Segerstam, the orchestral sound was stunning--ravishing strings, luscious winds, intense bass, in-your-face percussion and “Terminator II” brass.

The main difference is an expanded stage. It’s now enormous, supporting four tiers of wide semi-circular risers. The instrumental sections sit apart, each on its own island. The brass are far off, stage left. No more angry acoustic barriers. The acoustician, Lawrence Kirkegaard, has installed one of those glass canopies of movable panels, and it is an eyesore of lights, speakers, wires. But it seems to work.

Consequently, Segerstam was able enough to martial glory from Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” his homeland anthem, to practically start a revolution. The brass were unfettered, but now not only could the hall take it, the strings could take it too. Everyone was heard, and the richness and expanse of the sound, the sheer physical presence of it, was a thrill forever denied Dorothy Chandler Pavilion ears.

That performance alone was enough to prove that Symphony Center has become one of the great concert halls. But not a minute passed, even in this very strange concert, that didn’t further confirm it.

Segerstam, who made his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut last summer at the Hollywood Bowl to less than enthusiastic response, is a big man with a Brahmsian beard and the fussy movements of Oliver Hardy. In Nielsen’s Sixth Symphony (one of the strangest symphonies ever written), Segerstam seemed a man in close and appropriate touch with his inner nuttiness--light-hearted and delicate one moment, then, out of the blue, chaotic and explosive.

But in the new hall, the effects of Nielsen’s strange colors and violent noises were so vividly present that they became a complete, all-encompassing, surround-sound aural wonderland. Cranked-up Dolby in the movies should only sound a 10th so grand.

Segerstam’s psychedelic ideas about Grieg’s Piano Concerto didn’t go so well, especially with Ignat Solzhenitsyn as stolid, brittle soloist. But the piano sound in the hall was strong, bold, clear. The concert opened with the premiere of Segerstam’s conductorless piece, “February,” a return to a free-wheeling avant-garde of great whooshes of sounds, and the Symphony Center provided a stage on which they could breathe and blow up.

Not everything about the hall’s architectural additions, by architect Joseph Gonzalez of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, is quite so impressive. The place is now predictably well-scrubbed, and the bright auditorium looks festive. The lobby area is less cramped than it used to be and there are more restrooms. But enhanced backstage facilities, a new arcade, foyer, chamber music hall, education and administration wing, and upscale restaurant and bar (with tacky piped-in music) have the bland wood-and-brass poshness of a chain business hotel. Starting next month, parents will be able to drop the kids off at ECHO, a new learning center with computer-music games, and head next door to partake in the bar’s $75 caviar and vodka sampler. I don’t hold out much hope for ECHO, since the whole point of Symphony Center is the experience of the wallop of live sound.

The price tag for all of this, mainly taken care of through fund-raising, also packs its own wallop. And despite the center’s efforts to attract a wide audience to its many jazz, pop and family concerts, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra still has to maintain and finish paying for the facility. So ticket prices, too, now pack a wallop. Those good balcony seats on a weekend cost as much as $89; box seats are more than double that.

* Chicago Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave., (312) 294-3333.