There are many reasons for renovating current concert halls. It’s usually cheaper than building something new. Not only the art but also the science of acoustics has advanced. Renovations can be a great way to save a historic hall. However, one could argue that we should simply start over.
For the San Diego Symphony, starting over may have seemed like the best option. No American orchestra of San Diego’s strength or promise, under rising star music director Rafael Payare, has been stuck in a venue as disappointing as Symphony Towers.
Buried in a drab mixed-use skyscraper in the dreary financial district downtown, this old, fancy but rotten-acoustic 1929 movie theater long served as the unsavory home of the San Diego Symphony. The orchestra’s first job during a concert was to cheer up by wandering around the bureaucratic buildings in quiet neighborhoods at night or on weekends when the concert was held.
But miraculously, the San Diego Symphony turned the desolate site into a landmark through a reconstruction by architectural firm HGA and acoustician Paul Scarbrough. Symphony Towers has been given a surprisingly welcoming makeover. Acoustics shine in what was once known as Copley Symphony Hall, now the Jacobs Music Center. The neighborhood has also improved considerably as the new hall has kept more restaurants open. Parking is easy.
The Jacobs entrance takes you directly into the actual concert hall lobby. The first stop is a great artisan bakery that offers coffee, pastries, sandwiches, etc. at half the price and four times the quality of the catering at the Los Angeles Music Center. Perhaps some of the people who come to the bakery (during regular business hours) to buy a loaf of sourdough will also be tempted to buy concert tickets. The hall looks beautiful with new seating.
One of the visual disappointments is the stage, which is no longer wooden. Covered in what appears to be an acoustic material, it gives it a cool industrial look that doesn’t reflect the colored stage lights as pleasantly as the orchestral sound, combining warmth and clarity.
Giving the musicians a few weeks to adjust (the new acoustic will require the better part of a year or more), I heard a Sunday matinee round out the second week of regular symphony concerts. Moreover, Payare’s program demonstrated how the orchestra can meet traditional Beethoven concertos in orchestral performances.
The program was to be Brahms’ Violin Concerto and Schonberg’s tonal, kaleidoscopic, bombastic early tone poem “Pelleas et Mélisande.” Payare recently made an excellent recording of the latter with the Montreal Symphony, of which he is also music director. But when young violinist Sergey Khachatryan could not get his visa approved, Beethoven violin concerto veteran Pinchas Zukerman made a last-minute change.
Late replacement violinist Pinchas Zukerman and music director Rafael Payare perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the San Diego Symphony at the Jacobs Music Center.
(Sandy Huckaker / San Diego Symphony)
The 76-year-old Israeli violinist is more commonly seen as a conductor, but he made a strong impression last summer when he performed a Mozart concerto with the LA Phil under Zubin Mehta at the amplified Hollywood Bowl. His tone may not be as strong as it once was, and in Jacobs he needed time to warm up, but he gave Beethoven an understated elegance and depth.
From my seat in the balcony, his voice had a refined presence and every part of the orchestra had a sharp immediacy. When Zukerman returned to the stage for an encore, he launched into a speech about the meaning of Brahms’ beloved Lullaby (audible clearly in the hall even without a microphone).
“It hurts.” he said “The world is turned upside down. That’s enough. baboon!” The only way he knew to soothe an impossible situation, he explained, was to play this lullaby, played so gently with a shocking beauty that only a great artist with ideally sensitive acoustics could capture movingly.
Schoenberg’s ‘Pelleas et Mélisande’ was written in 1903 at a time when the 29-year-old composer was about to revolutionize music, but was still finding a way out of 19th-century Romanticism. This season the composer, who celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth last month, employs a huge orchestra to express a plethora of instrumental colors and effects in a variety of dramatic gestures. An important storyteller, he provides a gripping portrayal of Maurice Maeterlinck’s original work, particularly notable for his thoughtful use of subtitles.
So did Payare, who supported Schoenberg. He is a conductor with a great deal of grace and a great deal of arrogance, making the two unique yet ruthless together. This meant that broad gestures illuminated small details and that violent outbursts of excitement remained controlled.
It was a test not only of the orchestra but also of the acoustics. Here clarity becomes the dominant characteristic. There was none of the treble glare, nor any of the Geffen-based richness that lightly plagued the New York Philharmonic’s restored David Geffen Hall, where Scarbrough was also the acoustician. But Jacobs expertly handles the lullaby as well as the ear-shattering climax. The hall should open up acoustically over time and, if you’re lucky, soften.
But now it’s a place made for excitement. All that’s left is for San Diegans to wake up, smell the coffee on the way in, and enjoy the music inside. But by the second week, too many of the hall’s 1,831 seats were empty.
