Calling the audible

By Scott Timberg

Sept. 10, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

NEAR the end of 2001, one of the nation’s most eagerly awaited concert venues opened in Philadelphia. Much of the excitement about the $235-million Verizon Hall, part of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, was driven by a pair of tag-team stars: the elegant Uruguayan-born architect Rafael Vinoly and the American acoustician who is probably the world’s most famous, Russell Johnson.

But the opening, by many accounts, was a disaster. Apart from temperatures so cold that shivering women fled their expensive seats to huddle beside a restroom heater, the sound was deemed equally benumbed, described as “seriously short of sonic warmth” by Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News and “an acoustical Sahara” by the Washington Post’s Tim Page.

The hall’s reputation suffered so badly that when music administrator Mervon Mehta arrived to take a job there a few weeks after the opening, the cabdriver he hailed responded, “The Kimmel Center? Where they have that really awful sound?”

Mehta, the center’s vice president for programming and education, now insists that Verizon, after some fiddling, has become one of the nation’s most appealing such venues. But almost five years later, as the Cesar Pelli-designed, $200-million Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall is poised to open in Costa Mesa, with the same acoustician behind it, many wonder: Are we in for the same kind of ride?

Whether Orange County risks a repetition of the debacle in Philadelphia is impossible to say, even as Johnson and the project’s other principal acoustic designer, Damian Doria, sit in the new hall making slow, intricate adjustments.

Johnson, 82, whose bushy eyebrows and round belly give him the aspect of a slightly curmudgeonly hobbit, says he has no comment on what happened in Philadelphia. He once predicted that Segerstrom would be “the brother or sister” of Verizon Hall.

Yet Verizon aside, the New York-based Johnson commands enormous respect as one of the founders of what’s known as variable acoustics. His designs for the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas and Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England, for instance, are widely celebrated.

The press materials for the firm he founded in 1970, Artec Consultants, contain glowing quotes about Johnson-designed halls from conductor Kent Nagano, pianist Murray Perahia and singer Cecilia Bartoli. Even the skeptical critic Norman Lebrecht credits Artec’s hall in Lucerne, Switzerland, with accommodating “just about every degree of clarity the human ear can detect.”

Perhaps appropriately for a man credited with having some of the best ears in the world, Johnson’s original vision for acoustical perfection came from listening.

But he wasn’t hearing concerts in the world’s great venues: Johnson grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where he loved building treehouses and fitting out caves and where the most prominent acoustic space was the school band’s rehearsal hall. Still, he pursued music actively, taking in the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts as a teenager and, when stationed with the Army in the Philippines during World War II, catching concerts in an old movie theater in Manila.

After the war, while he was working as a recording engineer and then studying architecture and drama at Yale, his long-standing interests in science and the arts came together and inspired him to learn about, and to aim to design, acoustics for music and theater. But he’d never been to Europe before he started his career as an acoustician, and his trips to the great halls of New York and Boston were few.

Rather, Johnson remembers introducing himself to the director of a high school band as an acoustician. The man’s response, as Johnson recalls: “Oh, I’m glad you’re here -- so I can strangle you.” He heard this kind of frustration from almost every conductor and musician he spoke to at the time, and for good reason.

“Most halls for symphonic music in the United States, starting in the early ‘20s, had enormous seat counts, wide rooms, one balcony only and low ceilings,” he says. The post-World War I building boom was largely inspired by the idea that a single hall could offer opera, concert music, ballet and other performing arts -- a recipe, in short, for acoustical disaster.

“Worldwide travel was not very common then,” he says. “Americans had no way to compare their acoustical experiences with what they could hear in the great halls of Europe.”

But as more American musicians began to travel internationally in the ‘50s, Johnson started to detect a consensus about the great late-19th century halls: Vienna’s Musikverein followed by Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw followed by Boston’s Symphony Hall. Most of the venues championed by musicians were built from 1840 to 1905, seated about 2,000 spectators and had multiple balconies, high horizontal ceilings and parallel side walls.

As Johnson read 19th century records -- the memoirs of conductor and composer Hector Berlioz, for example -- and perused old photographs and drawings, “It became clear to me very quickly what the pattern was.”

In his early career as an apprentice acoustician, he used this shoebox model and discovered the value of being “firm” with clients on issues such as seat count. And when he founded Artec, he began a process that was riskier and more ambitious than simply replicating the celebrated concert halls of late Romantic Europe. That is, he pioneered the notion of variable acoustics, by which a hall is reset, depending on the type of music to be performed, using a combination of doors, curtains and canopies. All of these Artec signatures are in play at Segerstrom Concert Hall, where he and Doria have been directing technicians at computer keyboards to adjust every component.

By contrast, the classic halls of Europe, as well as many newer venues such as Walt Disney Concert Hall, use fixed acoustics. And the complication of variable acoustics -- with different settings not only for each genre but for different artists or composers within genres -- was thought to be part of the problem in Philadelphia.

A CUSTOMIZED COURSE

WHILE Artec’s halls bear Johnson’s philosophical and acoustic stamp, much of the day-to-day work tuning Segerstrom Concert Hall, which seats 2,000, has been done by Doria, Artec’s managing director. (Johnson is chairman.)

The hall is lined with more than 100 maple doors, which on a recent day are open about 25 degrees to let a certain amount of sound into four “reverberation chambers.” Doria is standing inside one of them.

“Basically this is a very hard, very reflective surface,” he says, striking his hand on the chamber’s blue concrete wall. “Some of all of the frequencies come in here, bang around for a while and then filter back into the room.” Heavy velour curtains hang from the top of the hall, about 80 feet up, and the more of the walls they cover, the more sound waves are muffled and absorbed. When these curtains are completely lifted, the chambers are at their most bright and reflective.

The doors and curtains, as well as the silver-leafed canopies that hang some 47 to 50 feet over the stage, are set for the evening’s Pacific Symphony rehearsal of Mahler’s First Symphony, whose music is famously heavy and thick. Were it a rehearsal of Mozart, the settings would be different. “You might do that by not even opening the chambers,” Doria says. “Or lowering the canopies a little to give more immediacy and presence. Mozart used a lot of notes, but not a lot of density.”

A jazz concert, for its part, might require acoustic curtains to be spread behind the stage to keep the drum sound from overwhelming the horns. The night before, the Beatles tribute group Classical Mystery Tour rehearsed with the local pops orchestra. “We had pretty much all the fabric in the room extended,” Doria says.

He’s been in and out of the hall for the last few weeks. “I listen for the blend of instruments, if they’re playing together, as well as the different timbres of instruments. And I like to hear a natural amount of reverberance to the music, not overwhelmingly loud or heavy. For Mahler 1, you should be able to hear the layers of the orchestra and their textures, building.”

As he explains the hall’s workings, Doria refers to reverberation time, which describes how long a sound takes to decay by 60 decibels and expresses how live, or dead, a hall is. (Doria can figure it by ear and placed it at about 2.5 seconds.) Johnson, who has listened quietly while his junior partner explained the hall’s acoustic workings, jumps in with a frustrated tone.

“There’s a tendency for people to get hung up on reverberation time,” he says, closing his eyes tightly, as if listening to the music of the spheres. “But that’s only a very small part of what we do. We spend an inordinate amount of time, our man-hours, keeping unwanted noise out of the concert hall. It could be a helicopter, a drinking fountain, an ice-making machine, turbulence in the ducts, an audience shuffling their feet. There’s almost no end to potential noise sources.

“The audience gets the most magical musical effects if the potential intruding noise is absolutely not there.”

THE INTANGIBLES OF TIME

IT all makes you wonder: How will this hall sound?

Mehta, of the Kimmel Center, thinks Verizon’s opening was misunderstood and blames critics for jumping to premature conclusions.

“A hall takes a couple years to settle in,” he says. “The orchestra needs time to settle in, the concrete needs to settle, the paint needs to really dry. It took about two years to get to the point where we have really good sound.” And Johnson “told us that before the first shovel went into the ground. He designs halls that are acoustically malleable, so we had to do a lot of experimenting.”

Mehta acknowledges that construction delays limited Artec’s tuning time in Philadelphia. But at this point, he says, the hall can accommodate a wide range of music -- rock and country acts are begging to appear. Classical critics, he maintains, have mostly concluded that the hall’s acoustic problems have been solved.

“The same thing will happen in Miami,” Mehta says of the Pelli- and Russell Johnson-designed Knight Concert Hall, which will open there next month. “And the same thing will happen in Segerstrom.”

Well, maybe. Johnson has not issued that kind of warning regarding the sound in Orange County, perhaps because he has had more time to tune in Costa Mesa and the hall has a better size. (Verizon’s 2,500 seats may be more than ideal.)

With Segerstrom, Johnson says that the sound will be adjusted over the next few years -- first by his firm and later by musicians and staff at the Orange County Performing Arts Center -- but that much of the work will be completed within two months or so after Friday’s opening.

“Ordinarily, you don’t want to be changing constantly,” says Johnson. “This is a very early period where we’re trying to learn as much as we can.” But after a couple of months of galas and other unusual concerts, the sound will be what he calls “normal.”

And his sense of that hasn’t changed since he started half a century ago.

“Power, impact, strength. Good natural frequency balance so that highs don’t dominate, the mids don’t dominate, the lows don’t dominate. The most difficult thing to achieve is to keep unwanted noise out of the house.

“You’re looking for what the composer intended. Trying to bring today’s audience what the composer had in his head.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Early highlights

Following are some of the events marking the opening of the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Friday: Inaugural Concert “Inspirations”

Pacific Symphony, Placido Domingo perform the world premiere of William Bolcom’s “Canciones de Lorca.”

Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall

Saturday: “Reverberations”

Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale perform the world premiere of Philip Glass’ “The Passion of Ramakrishna.” Violinist Midori also will perform.

Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall

Sept. 17: “The Magic of Mozart”