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Strathmore, a New Concert Hall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Concert Hall Review
The Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland. Opening night gala Saturday. www.strathmore.org.
North Bethesda, MD — When a $100 million concert hall opens, the make-or-break question concerns acoustics: How does it sound?
When the Music Center at Strathmore opened Saturday night in this affluent Washington, DC suburb, the question held implications that extended far beyond the home audience — as far as Baltimore and Atlanta.
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its chronically poetic Russian conductor, Yuri Temirkanov, played the black-tie and bejeweled opening gala and, in coming seasons, are booked for 40 visits a year. Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr. and Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan delivered speeches in the “I paid for this microphone” tradition: the center was built entirely from public funds, split between state and county.
For Atlanta, the connection comes with Larry Kirkegaard, the acoustician who designed Strathmore’s sound. His firm, the Chicago-based Kirkegaard Associates, also designed the acoustics for Emory University’s Emerson Concert Hall and — his highest profile job to date — will engineer the acoustics for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s planned Symphony Center.
Saturday’s program held a mish-mash of short pieces, some better indicators of acoustics than others. A few works, like “the Waltz of the Flowers” from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” was played with Temirkanov’s delightful combination of elegance and earthiness.
Star cellist Yo-Yo Ma was on hand, too, as he often is at big-budget occasions. His lean tone came through loud, clear and pure. A pair of sopranos, Harolyn Blackwell and Janice Chandler-Eteme, sang with verve but there was little bloom in their voices and their diction, to my ears in the first balcony, arrived garbled.
The musical highlight of the evening came from Baltimore-educated composer Michael Hersch. His earlier works were bursting with ideas that sometimes remained embedded in a dense, gloomy thicket of notes.
“Arrache,” commissioned for the occasion, opens in a quiet, atmospheric fog, pierced by woodwinds and growling low strings. Buzzing passages lead to agitated jolts from various groups within the orchestra. If some moments evoked Ligeti’s buzzing sound-sculptures or Stravinsky’s rhythmic energy, the whole was recognizable Hersch, urgent, expressive, impressive to hear. “Arrache” might be the break-through piece for this young composer. I wished they’d played it twice.
So to return to the big question: the Strathmore sound is good but not as dazzling as other recent venues, including Disney Hall in Los Angeles and the Meyerson in Dallas.
A concert hall is the instrument of the orchestra. At Strathmore, bass notes and middle-register tones were warm, but not tear-drop shaped, and the violins lacked sheen in higher frequencies. Overall, the orchestra’s timbre was true and immediate, but Strathmore lacks the luster and balance that characterizes the world’s best concert halls.
Is the problem that the players haven’t adjusted to their new sonic environment, despite the fact that they’ve been rehearsing here for four months? Or that the hall’s complex system of sound-absorbing banners (similar to Emory’s Emerson) still hasn’t been mastered to best effect? Or, the simplest answer, that the hall’s acoustics are inconsistent?
And compared to the ASO’s current home? It bears repeating that Atlanta Symphony Hall is the worst major-orchestra venue in America; Strathmore, in comparison, seems a miracle.
Strathmore’s relatively minor acoustical shortcomings are especially puzzling — or troubling — because the center hired the same team that created the excellent Ozawa Hall in Massachusetts: Acoustician Kirkegaard and architect William Rawn. They were given creative freedom to build the best hall they could, yet they couldn’t duplicate their earlier triumph. Is building a concert hall pseudo-science artistry? One starts to suspect that luck is a main ingredient.
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