Big dreams in the Mile High City

A livable town, Denver, so say the travel magazines. Beers are carefully handcrafted, bicycles are tolerated, spiffy European-style streetcars glide down wide streets. The sky is big, and the Rockies beckon. So do art and culture.

Despite the recent controversy in a small town 30 miles east of here, where an elementary schoolteacher was suspended for showing excerpts from a children’s video of Gounod’s “Faust” with a depiction of the devil, Denver is bullish on the arts.

At one end of the mile-long 16th Street Mall downtown are a beloved independent bookstore and new art galleries. At the other is the Civic Center, where the Denver Art Museum is building an attention-getting titanium-clad new wing designed by Daniel Libeskind and set to open in the fall.

Nearby, at the busy Denver Performing Arts Complex, is the new Ellie Caulkins Opera House. Next door, in Boettcher Concert Hall, the Colorado Symphony, which boasts successes that have made it a model for many midsize American orchestras, has a popular new music director, Jeffrey Kahane, and big plans.

The Ellie, as the opera house is familiarly called in an informal city, is not entirely new and nothing so high-profile as will be the museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton building’s aggressively jutting acute angles. What makes the Ellie new, besides its name, is its interior.

The shell is that of the cavernous old auditorium built for the 1908 Democratic National Convention that went on to serve as Denver’s principal performing arts facility for decades, home to symphony, opera and just about anything else you might want to put on a stage until Boettcher was built in 1978.

With a $25-million city bond, $7 million from George and Ellie Caulkins (hence the name) and the rest of the $92-million budget provided by donations, the renovation is meant to serve as home to Opera Colorado and Colorado Ballet. But the city owns the Ellie and also wanted it to be useful as a rental space for other events, suitable even for film.

Any such multipurpose space requires acoustical compromises, and there have been problems since the Ellie opened in September with an Opera Colorado gala that featured opera excerpts sung by Renee Fleming and Ben Heppner, and a song cycle about a woman who meets a blind date at an art museum that was commissioned from composer Jake Heggie and playwright Terrence McNally.

Expectations were too high. Architect Peter Lucking and acoustician Robert Mahoney had boasted that the Ellie would turn out to be one of the 10 best opera houses in the world. Well, it isn’t, and given its myriad requirements and modest budget, was never likely to be. After the initial opera and ballet productions, of “Carmen” and “The Nutcracker,” Mahoney began some fixes before Opera Colorado mounted “Norma” this month.

The house was said to be acoustically sensitive enough to enable an audience to hear a pin drop but lacking the sonic energy to make a big impact, so one of Mahoney’s fixes was to remove sound-dampening material.

He may have taken away a bit too much, at least for the slam-bang kind of “Norma” that Opera Colorado mounted Saturday night. There was little that was quiet or subtle about the performance, and from my seat in the orchestra section, the sound hit like a ton of bricks.

The interior of the house is a modified horseshoe, but with some ship-like wooden curves on the side of the proscenium. The floors are concrete, partially covered by industrial carpeting, and the seats, covered in a coarse red fabric, have movable backs. I found that last feature uncomfortable at first but eventually adapted to it.

The house feels as though it needs a bit more decoration to deflect sound. The effect Saturday, which was the last of the company’s four “Norma” performances, was of singing that seemed to come straight from the cast’s mouths, which is not always a pleasurable sensation. The sound itself didn’t much breathe, although you could hear every breath the singers took. More tweaking will be needed, but such adjustments are, I suspect, doable.

Ultimately, the Ellie is a house for Opera Colorado to grow into. The company is modest, presenting three productions a season. The new production of “Norma” displayed ambition, more raw than cooked. James Robinson, the company’s artist director, is responsible for most of its productions and in his program note suggested some interesting parallels between the Roman conquest of the Druids, the subject of Bellini’s opera, and today. The Romans were blustering conquerors who had no respect for the environment or other cultures, he noted.

The bluster in this production, however, came from the Druid camp. Hasmik Papian’s overwrought Norma took a long time to find her nobility. Too much of the time, she was forced to hold her own against the scenery-stealing, strident Adalgisa of Irina Mishura. The bland Philip Webb was too large to elbow in front of, but he made little impression as the Roman proconsul, Pollione.

Against a background full of lumber (the deforestation?), Robinson let his singers melodramatically emote all they pleased. His touches included 11 skinny, loincloth-clad extras who put on war paint and tried to look threatening.

But in the pit, the Colorado Symphony, conducted by Stephen Lord, was very good, even if Bellini asked little of it beyond oom-pah-pah. The next afternoon, in a long program of American music in Boettcher led by Kahane, the orchestra was again very good.

This is an ensemble on the move. According to a report Saturday in the Rocky Mountain News, the orchestra’s attendance has grown 23% in the last five years and subscriptions this season are up 32% over last season. Sunday’s matinee did not reach capacity, but Boettcher, the country’s first surround concert hall, is too big at 2,700 seats. To help support the symphony’s claims, the line for tickets was impressively long for a splendidly warm and sunny winter day in an outdoorsy city.

Kahane has proved a draw, but so was his predecessor, Marin Alsop. For an Angeleno, it proved interesting to see Kahane, who is also music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, handle a big band, which he did with as much competence as exuberance.

His intent was to consider ways in which the vernacular has entered American symphonic music over the last century. He began by offering two hokey symphonies by young composers. Kevin Puts’ Symphony No. 3 (“Vespertine”) treats an album by the imaginative pop star Bjork as romantic slush. Kenji Bunch’s Symphony No. 1 (“Lichtenstein Triptych”) is jazzier, but it too is highly conventional in its treatment of pop elements.

From the keyboard, Kahane then conducted Copland’s Suite from “Appalachian Spring” in its original 13-instrument version, Gershwin’s Concerto in F, and rags by Scott Joplin, Zez Confrey and James Reese Europe. I would have liked a full orchestra for Copland in this hall and a smaller one for Gershwin, since Kahane’s sizzling solos were too often smothered.

But no matter, the playing was exciting all around, and the audience responded as if thrilled. Kahane may be overly ambitious with this fine orchestra -- next month he has programmed a weekend of three different Mozart concertos on each of three successive nights (with him playing six of those for piano). That’s a lot of music for any orchestra. But that kind of energy does get noticed, and if his concerto performances are as brilliant as were his recent ones in L.A., he is almost guaranteed to draw large, happy crowds.

And what crowds! All types come to opera and symphony here. On both days, I sat amid a few cowboys -- at least they were dressed like cowboys. For that alone, you’ve got to love Denver.