How Not to Open a Hall

Open a new concert hall, and things will go wrong. We don’t need Peter or any other principle-producer to tell us that.

A fiasco in Philadelphia last December was the latest example, and not all of the problems associated with the opening of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts could have been helped. Some of them are simply the nature of the beast. But it needn’t have been quite so embarrassing.

With the Walt Disney Concert Hall starting to show its shiny exoskeleton--and with new concert halls sprouting in Costa Mesa, Atlanta and Montreal--it is not too soon to begin the essential planning to avoid Philadelphia’s most egregious mistakes.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has just begun drumming up national business for Disney. On Valentine’s Day, it held a press conference in New York with the hall’s architect, Frank O. Gehry; its acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota; and the orchestra’s music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Next month, it will take that show on the road to Europe and possibly Japan. Given the combination of Gehry’s exalted architecture, Toyota’s radical surround-sound acoustical design and Salonen’s fresh musical thinking for the orchestra, Disney Hall is expected to do wonders for L.A.’s cultural image.

Then again, Philadelphia, in New York’s shadow, has an image problem as well. And now, 21/2 months after opening its highly touted Kimmel Center--the product of elegant architect Rafael Vinoly and noted acoustician Russell Johnson--Philadelphia has a worse image problem.

Acoustics are always the main worry with any new hall. With so many variables, no one really knows exactly how an orchestra will sound until it sets foot inside and begins to play. The first rehearsal provides raw information. A hall has different acoustical characteristics when sound reflects off empty seats or is absorbed by bodies filling them. Musicians need time and practice to learn how to use a space. As materials settle and wood ages during the first several months, the sonic character of a hall is likely to mellow, but how or how much is unpredictable.

With a Russell Johnson hall, there are additional factors. The acoustician favors electronically adjustable reflecting panels, curtains and sound chambers that can make an orchestra’s acoustical learning curve that much steeper. Toyota’s “vineyard” model (so called because it creates terraces and pavilions of seats) doesn’t include those bells and whistles, but still there will be subtle options for tuning the hall over time.

The bottom line is that opening nights never show off a hall’s full sonic potential. And this tends to be made worse by the fact that concert halls are rarely completed on schedule.

Verizon Hall, the orchestra’s home in Kimmel Center, was so far behind schedule that workers were at it around the clock, right up to the day it opened. Even then, Johnson’s acoustical machinery was not yet operational. Not only did the orchestra have little time to rehearse in the hall, but the building itself was far from ready for public performances. And it will be some time before Johnson’s acoustical accoutrements are finished and the orchestra learns how best to use them.

Meanwhile, concerts are being given. I hold out hope that Verizon will turn out fine--I heard a glimmer of sonic sparkle amid the opening-night blare, but most early reviews of Verizon were negative, if guarded. Critics at the Philadelphia Inquirer have been reporting that as work continues, the hall sounds different on every occasion they visit it. London’s Financial Times gave the Philadelphians a two-month grace period before checking out the hall, and still found an acoustic mess. Costa Mesa beware, because Johnson has the same system in mind for the new addition to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Lesson No. 1: Don’t be impatient. It may be impossible to take up residence in a fully seasoned hall, but Philadelphia would have done itself a favor had it waited until the fall.

Fortunately, this is a lesson that our Philharmonic seems to have learned. Disney was supposed to be ready next January, but the orchestra decided to play it safe and open the hall at the beginning of the 2003-4 season. Still, that’s no guarantee of anything. Construction on any hall is very intricate; the complexity of Disney Hall seems almost nightmarishly so. Constant pressure needs to be applied to make sure it is ready early enough so that the musicians will have a reasonable amount of time to rehearse in it before they let the rest of us in.

Lesson No. 2: Programming, programming, programming. It’s the most important component of a hall’s opening, and it is entirely in the orchestra’s control. Yet it is the one that is most often botched.

These are gala events. Ticket prices are high, the crowd exclusive. Kimmel Center charged $5,000 a seat for its two-night inauguration of Verizon Hall. But a gala mentality can be a recipe for disaster.

When a great orchestra is at its best, when it can bring to life the music that means the most to it, it doesn’t matter where it plays. I love hearing the Berlin Philharmonic in its home, the Philharmonie (the original vineyard-style auditorium), and I dislike the colorless acoustics of Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County center. But the Berliners’ signature Beethoven sounded spectacular when they visited there last fall.

Philadelphia made one wrong programming choice after another. On Verizon’s first night, Elton John ignored acoustics altogether with blasting loudspeakers that drove symphony lovers (including the architect and acoustician) out of the hall. The center’s namesake benefactor, Sidney Kimmel, who paid John’s $2-million fee out of his own pocket, told the press he feared that the Philadelphia Orchestra wasn’t quite festive enough for that occasion.

Sadly, he was right. The next evening, the orchestra gave an uninspired concert. It commissioned a new piece from Aaron Kernis simply because he is a native Philadelphian. But the orchestra has had little experience with Kernis’ music, and its Old World German music director, Wolfgang Sawallisch, has little feeling for its American idiom. It didn’t go well.

Celebrity-struck, management programmed that rare Beethoven dud, the Triple Concerto, for no other reason than it wanted Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax on stage. Finally, the orchestral glitter of the second suite from Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe” was meant to show off the lush “Philadelphia Sound.” But Sawallisch is no sensualist, offering a performance that was all luster and no lust.

Lesson No. 3: If a new work is commissioned (and the temptation is irresistible), keep in mind that the performers are dealing with a lot that is new, and new music will be a risky proposition unless the conductor and the players have a relationship with the composer. Although the Los Angeles Philharmonic refuses to confirm that it has commissioned a work from John Adams, it is an open secret that has been reported on Internet music sites. If so, that would make perfect sense. Two years ago, Adams wrote his largest orchestra work, “Naive and Sentimental Music,” for the Philharmonic, and Salonen’s performance of it was a triumph. Next season, Adams will participate in a special residency with the Philharmonic.

Beyond that, the orchestra needs to demonstrate what makes it thrilling. There is much that the Philharmonic can choose from. I would put Stravinsky and Ligeti high on the list. Salonen’s own “LA Variations” is ideal; it is a brilliant showpiece written explicitly for this band, and it perfectly represents what conductor and orchestra stand for. Had Sawallisch stuck to his composers--Strauss, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak--it might have been easier to overlook everything else that went wrong on the opening night.

As for soloists, if absolutely necessary (and they aren’t), they must be chosen with great care. The Big Names are so often encountered at galas that they can actually make a special occasion seem ordinary.

Lesson No. 4: No speeches. The Philadelphia Orchestra introduced its Verizon opener with a half-hour of provincial self-congratulation from inarticulate arts managers and slick politicians. Kernis’ piece then played to an already antsy audience, its ears by then accustomed to the amplified sound of loudspeakers and no longer quite as fresh for live music. If at some point Salonen wants to say something to the audience during the Disney opening, that’s fine, as long as it is him and him alone. He’s good at it and has no tolerance for stupidity. But first, let there be music.

There is also a larger issue in this lesson, which is the role psycho-acoustics play in any concert. In their gala mind-set, the Philadelphians wanted to get the concert over with as quickly as possible so they could hold a dinner and dance in the lobby afterward. To do so, they played the program without intermission. But as anyone who plans concerts should know, the second half of concerts is almost always better than the first. After intermission, the players tend to be less nervous and more comfortable with their acoustical surroundings. The audience, as well, has become more acclimated.

An intermission also provides an opportunity to fix things. At Verizon, the air conditioner was out of control, and it became so cold that several women in the audience, wearing strapless gowns, could bear it no longer and left early to huddle in the one women’s room where they could find heat. It is not hard to guess what they are most likely to remember about the evening.

A final lesson: Consider just how much a new concert hall can mean to a city. In Australia, Sydney built an opera house and got a whole new symbol for city and country. What does it say about Philadelphia when during the dinner following the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first appearance in Verizon, the dance band immediately struck up “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”?

Disney Hall also needs to be especially careful about how it presents itself--and Los Angeles--to the world. It isn’t too late, for example, to undo its decision to honor corporate sponsorship by naming its auditorium after Ralphs/Food 4 Less Foundation.

It may not be as bad as Philadelphia capitulating to a corporate moniker, Verizon, for the orchestra’s hall. Only Disney’s main auditorium will be saddled with the risible Ralphs designation, which the Philharmonic’s spokespeople say will be confined to a small, tasteful plaque.

Still, small details can loom large, especially when they have the potential to wreak havoc on perceptions. Once Philly’s air conditioner had raised the wrong sort of opening-night goose bumps, even an acoustical masterpiece might not have sounded warm.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.