A shimmering sonic showplace in Philadelphia

The Vienna Philharmonic came to Philadelphia on Wednesday night for the first time in 36 years. Although the band, perhaps the world’s most elite orchestra, appears in nearby New York annually and has even debarked in far-off Costa Mesa twice in the last four years, it has steered clear of Philadelphia for the simple reason that, like the city’s own exceptional orchestra, it hated playing in the acoustically dead Academy of Music.

But now there’s Verizon Hall, the largest of the two venues in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Still, considering all the bad press this concert hall has received, the Viennese may well have felt as much trepidation Wednesday night as did a listener whose only experience with it came at its opening in December 2001.

At that well-publicized disaster, the acoustical work was far from finished. The hall was freezing cold -- several shivering women, in sleeveless gowns, gave up their $5,000 seats when word got out that a ladies’ room in the basement had heat. But at least that meant that the patron whose chair collapsed during the performance could find a free seat. Through it all it, the center’s administration looked embarrassingly provincial.

Then, three months ago, as Kimmel approached its first anniversary, real disaster struck. During a Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsal, the automated sprinkler system malfunctioned, drenching the orchestra and its valuable -- in some cases, irreplaceable -- instruments.

Returning to the Kimmel Center to hear the Vienna Philharmonic on Wednesday night and the Philadelphia Orchestra on Thursday, I found Raphael Vinoly’s handsome building looked the same as it did on opening night, but behind the scenes, a great deal has changed.

By far the most important improvement has been an exceptional acoustical transformation. Verizon initially displayed the Philadelphia Orchestra in such a harsh and glaring way that the ensemble’s famously luscious sound at times approached outright ugliness.

For an Angeleno that was especially worrisome, because Verizon’s acoustics are the work of Russell Johnson, who will handle the sound for the new concert hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The groundbreaking was last month; construction is expected to be completed in 2006.

But Verizon ideally captured every ghostlike wisp of sound in Gidon Kremer’s ethereal performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic. Sitting in the first tier, I felt as though that violin was hovering magically in the air all around me. Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s measured conducting obsessively observed every orchestral detail, and here, too, nothing came between the beautiful sounds these musicians made and my ears. When a high gong or triangle was struck very softly, its golden shimmer gave me goose bumps.

The next night, hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Christoph Eschenbach(who becomes its music director next season) brought a whole new set of acoustical revelations. The hall’s tightly focused sound loses bloom at the orchestra’s loud, massed climaxes. But it captured the richness of the strings in Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor. The brass sounded smooth and thick as honey. And the percussion made an impressive impact.

What happened? Johnson, an advocate of adjustable acoustics, rimmed Verizon Hall with sound chambers that can be opened and closed at will. The canopy above the stage is also movable. But construction of the Kimmel Center was so far behind schedule that none of this technology was in place the first night the Philadelphia orchestra played in the hall.

And even months later, when the work was finally finished, the tuning had just begun. Week in and week out for the rest of the season, Johnson experimented with different settings, opening and closing the 100 doors to the sound chambers, raising and lowering the canopy. He worked with Simon Woods, the head of artistic planning for the orchestra. Both have long experience with this. Johnson has many admired halls to his credit, including ones in Dallas; Birmingham, England; and Lucerne, Switzerland. Woods is a former CD producer who recorded in Birmingham when Johnson’s hall opened there 13 years ago.

By last summer, Woods says, Verizon was “good but not there.” Over the summer, $3 million in extra work was done to the $265-million Kimmel Center, including -- finally -- varnishing the stage and building risers. That was what turned the sonic corner, according to Woods. He says that the hall’s transparency is so attractive some find it preferable to the warmer, but fuzzier, Carnegie Hall in New York. Hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra earlier in the week in Carnegie under Eschenbach (in a different program), I found myself, if not fully agreeing with that assessment, at least finding value in both points of view.

The Kimmel Center has also turned an administrative corner. When it opened, displaying minimal vision as it haphazardly booked low rent acts, the hall’s administrators did little to spotlight the Philadelphia Orchestra. But finally, in the form of a plaque, Verizon Hall has been dubbed the orchestra’s official home.

This was one of the first acts of former Lincoln Center administrator Janice Price, hired last year to run the facility. Her programming is a sophisticated mix of world music, jazz and classical music, and she has also coped with the recalcitrant sprinklers and air conditioning.

The deluge, she says, was a computer problem that is still being investigated. Newly stringent fire laws mandated a system that doesn’t just shower the hall but floods it. Price says the good side of that catastrophe is that it may prevent other halls from adopting similar technology. Although time will tell whether the wood in Verizon will warp or buckle, the orchestra was lucky; the only instrument ruined was a grand piano.

The air conditioning is under control, as well, and the Kimmel Center seems a success. It reaches a wide audience, about a quarter of which is non-white and nearly half of which are attending arts events for the first time. David Patrick Stearns, a music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said the hall passes his test: “It doesn’t get in the way of the music.”

Will there be more adjustments? Woods says the orchestra has found the setting it likes, although Eschenbach may fine tune it when he becomes music director.

And OCPAC can breath a little easier. Or can it? Woods points out that the transparency of sound in Verizon is “absolutely merciless.” Great ensembles sound wonderful, but lesser ones are cruelly exposed. The Pacific Symphony, which will be resident in the new hall, is hardly on the level of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nor does it play nearly as many concerts as the Philadelphians do, so the adjustment process could be painfully slow.

But Woods also points out that the new hall in Orange County could be an agent in the orchestra’s growth. The City of Birmingham Symphony, he says, “was very much better in 1995 than it was in 1985.”