Bard’s joyful noise bodes well for L.A.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts is a dramatically soaring building with soaring ambitions and, in its 900-seat Sosnoff Theater, a soaring sound to match. During a noisy and exuberant opening weekend, this marvelous new facility for music, opera, dance and theater, at a small liberal arts college in the Hudson River Valley, has already begun making a statement that is hard to ignore.

The eyes and, more important, the ears of the musical world are on Bard College because the Fisher Center represents the first collaboration between Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry and Japan’s leading acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota, who are also at work on Walt Disney Concert Hall. Fisher is a test of sorts for L.A., in that it offers a taste of the collaborative process between Gehry and Toyota; Fisher is Gehry’s first concert hall and Toyota’s first acoustical job outside Asia.

But it is also a job unlike any other. The client is Bard’s president, Leon Botstein. In addition to running the school and being one of the country’s prominent intellectuals, Botstein has a career in musical academia and is a working conductor and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York City. A dozen years ago, he initiated a stimulating annual music festival at Bard that concentrates on a different composer each summer. The Fisher Center is the brainchild of a man who can do it all and who expects the same from a concert hall.

Among Botstein’s unreasonable demands: a hall with fewer than 1,000 seats that would be intimate enough for chamber music and student concerts but expansive enough for the massive symphonic repertory that he loves. If that weren’t enough, Botstein also required a multipurpose fully equipped space in which opera can be produced, dance presented, lectures given. And he envisioned seemingly contradictory acoustical properties. Seeking to capture young ears attuned to loud music, Botstein wanted live unamplified music to sound boldly in-your-face while still maintaining a satisfying traditional warmth and bloom.

To a considerable degree, this has been achieved in Sosnoff’s concert hall configuration. Despite its relatively small size, Sosnoff is tall and contains the volume of air typical of a much grander symphonic space, thus allowing orchestral sound considerable room for reverberation. To give the sound direct impact, Toyota and Gehry designed a mammoth shell composed of eight 7,000-pound panels for the stage. It requires 80 man-hours to remove or install when the theater switches from orchestra concerts to dance or opera and back again. The smaller Theater Two, a flexible black box, is expected to accommodate drama, dance, chamber music and experimental work for which there are no categories.

With characteristic chutzpah, Botstein opened Fisher on Friday night by pushing Sosnoff to the limits. Without ceremony, he launched into the evening’s single work, Mahler’s 95-minute Third Symphony. The stage was crowded with the American Symphony and, behind it, the Concert Chorale of New York. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus was placed on the second balcony.

No one who could get a facility like this built is likely to hold back when it comes to conducting an orchestra, and the loudest climaxes were not without discomfort. But at its most thrilling, the sound raised goose bumps. Not so much in-your-face as in-your-head, it might be likened to listening to music through the kind of exceptionally fine headphones that make the rest of the world disappear. Here, you get all that musical involvement without subtracting your environment from the equation.

Sosnoff is particularly satisfying in its ability to bring out the timbral character of instruments. The basses, which Botstein sat behind the first violins on the audience left, proved one such pleasure. Even their lowest notes vibrated through the hall with presence and clarity. But the hall can also be ferocious. When Botstein let winds and brass rip, there was the excitement of being under attack.

Despite some overwhelming climaxes, the hall seemed mostly unflappable and happily accommodated the choruses. In the fourth movement, Nancy Maultsby’s dark-toned, commanding mezzo-soprano floated easily through the theater.

A chamber concert of works by five Bard faculty composers on Saturday night gave Sosnoff a very different kind of workout. It included two notable premieres, the first of which was Joan Tower’s “Incandescent,” commissioned for the Fisher opening and performed by the Emerson String Quartet. The powerful 18-minute work, like Shostakovich but without the gloom, proved a brilliant acoustical test as the Emersons bathed listeners in a luscious string sound that you could almost reach out and caress.

There were also excerpts from Richard Teitelbaum’s “Z’vi,” an opera about the 17th century false messiah Shabbetai Z’vi, which will receive its premiere at the Venice Biennale this summer. It included two Arab musicians, a cantor, the sensational clarinetist David Krakauer and an elaborate electronic setup operated by the composer. This breathtaking score -- in which Krakauer and Jacob Ben-Zion Mendelson, in full cantorial robe, engaged in a heartwarming duet of Sufi music with Omar Faruk Tekbilek, transcended acoustics altogether. Here Sosnoff’s immediacy put magnificent musicians in our laps, creating an overpoweringly visceral effect of barriers being broken.

The advance word on Theater Two was less promising. During rehearsals for JoAnne Akalaitis’ production of Racine’s “Phedre,” actors reportedly complained that they had to strain to be heard. But by performance time, Saturday afternoon, this passionate, edgy, updated production, with Karen Kandel’s impressively unhinged performance in the title role, came off vividly.

It is still too early to tell the full potential of Fisher. Sosnoff won’t be ready for opera until this summer, when Bard will mount the first American production of Janacek’s early opera, “Osud,” (Fate), in a staging by Akalaitis, with sets by Gehry and conducted by Botstein. This will be part of an ambitious new multidisciplinary festival in July and August, SummerScape, which will precede the Bard Music Festival, thus making the Hudson River Valley a serious destination for the arts traveler.