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August 2007
Name the New AJC Arts Blog and Win a Prize!
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As ajc.com continues to refine (and hopefully improve) its website, there will be some changes in the coming days and weeks. Among them is a new, multi-author fine arts blog. I’ll be one of the contributors, along with art/architecture critic Catherine Fox and arts reporter Kirsten Tagami. (Wendell Brock’s theater blog will remain its own thing, for now.)
The plan is to make this new arts blog a one-stop destination for all things Atlanta arts, including articles, news, readers’ comments and the rest.
But we need a name — something catchy, clever, appealing and artsy and that will wear well. Email me your ideas. Include your name, address and area of artistic interest and we’ll send the winner a suitable prize hand-picked by our celebrity judges. Don’t delay!
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Acoustics and Audiences at Cobb Energy arts center
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Preparing for its Sept. 29 opening at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, the Atlanta Opera recently invited subscribers, former subscribers and donors to a pair of “listening events.” Tickets were by invitation only.
For these opera-highlights shows — the first night included a pianist, a quintet of singers and the chorus; the second had singers and the orchestra — the importance was two-fold.
They were the first live-performance tests of the acoustics in the center’s 2,750-seat John A. Williams Theatre, and they were an assurance to opera audiences that the new suburban theater would outpace and outperform every in-town venue the 27-year-old opera company has ever had.
Acoustics and audience reaction — these are separate factors, but not unrelated.
The audience side of the equation is easiest to measure. Carole Hall’s impressions, and her history with the Atlanta Opera, help tell a wider story. She’d been a long-time opera subscriber at the Fox Theatre, the historic Midtown movie palace that wasn’t suitable for opera.
But soon after the company switched venues to the equally cavernous Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center in 2003 — for a variety of do-or-die reasons — she lost interest and dropped her subscription.
“I didn’t enjoy the Civic Center,” she explains, echoing the general trend of subscribers who abandoned the opera. “And I didn’t need to see another ‘La Boheme’ done there.”
Still, she remains an opera fan, and the invitation to catch the company’s unofficial debut in the new Cobb center proved irresistible — nevermind that last year she moved to North Carolina.
At the end of the listening event — just 90 minutes of music — Hall was on her feet. She cheered the performer. She cheered the handsome Williams theater. And she cheered, no less, the future of the Atlanta Opera.
How’d she like it? “There’s no comparison with the Civic Center or the Fox!” she cried out. “It suddenly seems so professional, it’s like real opera.”
Hall’s friend, Lisa Stewart, who lives just down the road in the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, answered the question with her own: “Are you kidding? Smaller is better for opera. Everything feels like an improvement.”
Hall says she plans to re-subscribe and make performances part of a weekend getaway back to Atlanta.
At this first public encounter with the new Williams theater, says Atlanta Opera general director Dennis Hanthorn, “it accomplished what I most wanted: get people to figure out where to park, which doorway to use, the layout of the theater, where they’d find the bar and the restrooms. Now they’re excited and can tell their friends that things are happening at the [Cobb center].”
MODELING SOUND
No one has ventured to call the new Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre a cutting-edge facility, but its effects are likely to be seismic for the Atlanta Opera and other ensembles that trade in all-natural sound — if the acoustics are good.
Yet the center isn’t designed specifically as an opera house.
James S. Van Duys, the center’s main architect from the Atlanta firm of Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates, describes the Williams theater as “a multi-purpose facility, a ‘road-house’ theater,” where the primary function is hosting touring Broadway-style shows. These extravaganzas often arrive with the complete package: sets, lights, electronics and portable everything. All they need is an empty stage and plenty of electrical sockets.
And because these shows are typically heavily amplified, the host theater needs to be acoustically “dead” so the high-decible noises from the loudspeakers don’t overpower the room to create sonic mush.
Opera, which thrives on the glories of the unamplified human voice, comes from almost the opposite direction.
For opera, says Hanthorn, “we need acoustics ‘tuned’ to a reverberation of about 1.4 seconds” — the length of time a single note, like a bass drum thwack, hangs in the air. “This strikes the balance of the clarity and articulation of the singers and the warmth and punch of the orchestra.”
Achieving that balance, or at least getting close, is the job of acousticians from Chicago’s Kirkegaard Associates.
The technology of a theater is gradually becoming standardized, says Larry Kirkegaard , whose firm has helped design some of the best contemporary concert halls in America, including Ozawa Hall at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. “In a sense, the parameters of what we know in acoustical design is narrowing; we know what to listen for, we’ve carved out what works.”
In the best circumstances, theater and concert hall acoustics are a tricky combination of mathematics, art, engineering, salesmanship and luck. For the center’s Williams theater, acoustics are still more complicated.
They were initially designed by the Kirkegaard firm’s Dawn Schuette , who did a similar service for Emory University’s Schwartz Center and had been a major contributor to designs for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s wished-for Symphony Center. (In 2006, however, she and two other senior acousticians split with their boss and formed Threshold Acoustics, also based in Chicago.)
Now Kirkegaard associate Anthony Shou is the point man for the Cobb project. In past months, Shou came to Atlanta regularly to monitor progress. The Williams theater, he says, “doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles and few moving parts, so it’ll be easier to manage and still support the various programs.”
Among the acoustical elements in place:
—- The room is filled with alternately hard, sonically reflective surfaces — like the endangered makore wood veneer along the balcony fronts — and soft, sonically absorptive panels.
—- The “moving parts” include sound-absorbing curtains along the top balcony’s back wall and high on the side walls, near the ceiling.
—- Acoustically transparent metal mesh screens, shaped like diamonds, block the audience’s view of the overhead and stage lights while not interfering with the flow of sound. They cover about 40 percent of the ceiling.
—- With Dobbins Air Force Base nearby, Kirkegaard insisted that the outer walls block all jet sounds. The side walls are thus 20 inches thick and there’s a double roof, one six inches thick, the other nine inches.
—- The foundation is drilled into bedrock, so the rumbles from adjacent I-75 won’t be felt in the theater.
—- Even the A/C vents are designed with acoustics in mind: instead of big turbines blowing air through large pipes, with the accompanying whooshing sound, here all the vents are under the audience seats and have the circular metal look of electric stove burners. As in Emory’s Schwartz Center, the heat and A/C travels silently, wafting into the auditorium at a gentle flow.
One key piece of acoustical equipment isn’t part of the new center. For budgetary reasons, the Cobb center decided not to build an orchestral “shell” — a curved, portable wall positioned behind the performers that helps bounce sounds back out to the audience.
ASO personnel manager Russell Williamson, who attended the first of the opera’s listening events, says that the absence of a shell (and lack of space to store one in the future) means that orchestras will have trouble being heard in the theater — whether it’s the Cobb Symphony Orchestra, the ASO or big-name orchestras on tour. This fact greatly reduces the likelihood that orchestras will have a strong presence in the center’s programming.
Is that a bad thing?
As it is, Atlanta suffers from too many multi-purpose venues, which try to serve many masters and is ideal for none. The Cobb center’s Williams Theatre has to manage to balance just two identities — roadhouse and opera house — to achieve success.
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First Listen at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
Soon everyone interested in Atlanta’s perfoming-arts scene will have an opinion about the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, a multi-purpose “road house” theater set to open Sept 15.
Subscribers and donors of the Atlanta Opera, about 1,000 people, got their first taste Tuesday night at a “listening event,” where Walter Huff’s opera chorus, pianist Craig Kier and a quintet of singers offered arias and excerpts from the opera’s 2007-08 season. Bob Edge, an Atlanta attorney and opera board member, served as affable host.
Yoel Levi, the former Atlanta Symphony music director, was in the audience. He’ll make his Atlanta Opera debut in November, conducting “Hansel and Gretel.”
While it’s still too early to pronounce judgement, how did it sound? Larry Kirkegaard, whose Kirkegaard Associates firm, based in Chicago, designed the auditorium’s acoustics, admits he was disappointed Tuesday night. “The sound was not getting out of the stage as well as we would have hoped,” he said during a lunch at the center Wednesday.
To fix the problem, Kirkegaard and his senior consultant Anthony Shou rolled up their sleeves and began building a “shell” to improve the sound for tonight’s invitation-only performance, the opera’s second and final listening event with singers and full orchestra. (A stage shell is a curved, portable wall that’s positioned behind the performers and designed to bounce sound back out to the audience.)
“We’re very hands-on,” Shou said, after a trip to the nearest Home Depot and an art store. The two purchased every framed painter’s canvas they could find and plan to construct a shell with them, with rolls of painter’s canvas to go overhead.
Heavy fabrics provide gentle reflection of higher tones, from middle C on up, explained Kirkegaard. And that’s what some listeners felt was missing from Tuesday’s event. The fabric shell helps make up for the fact that there was no scenery onstage to reflect the singers and orchestra, Kirkegaard said.
For budgetary reasons, the Cobb Energy center did not include an orchestral shell in its stage equipment — which means that if groups like the Cobb Symphony Orchestra or Atlanta Symphony wanted to perform there, they’d need to construct their own.
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London Calling for ASO Conductors
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
When the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s house conductors aren’t waving their batons in Symphony Hall, they’re likely on the podium of some other orchestra, somewhere else in the world: That’s why they’re called “jet-set” and “star” conductors.
In the coming days, in a coincidence of planning, both ASO music director Robert Spano and ASO principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles will lead British orchestras at the most comprehensive and populist classical-music festival in the world, London’s BBC Proms.
The Proms concerts are streamed online — www.bbc.co.uk/proms — where you can listen live and listen again for up to a week after the event. The festival boasts an endlessly impressive list of distinguished performers and fascinating repertoire from the old favorites to world premieres. Many concerts are previewed with an informative “pre-Prom talk,” also streamed on the site.
Runnicles gets the biggest show of the festival, Sunday Aug. 12. Wagner’s marathon “Gotterdammerung” — “the Twilight of the Gods” that concludes his four-opera “Ring” cycle — starts at 11 a.m. Sunday (4 p.m. in London) and runs till about 7:20 p.m. (10:20 in London).
Among his able cast is soprano Christine Brewer as Brunnhilde, perhaps the most maligned and noble female character in all of opera. Brewer has a serious following among ASO audiences, especially for the various Wagner roles she’s sung here, partnered by Runnicles.
Spano takes the stage two days later. On Tuesday, Aug. 14, he’ll conduct the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a strong regional ensemble, in music he’d recently rehearsed in Atlanta. His program: Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in a semi-improvised version with the Marcus Roberts Trio as soloists, plus Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka” and dances from Bernstein’s “On the Town.”
Now in its 111th year, the Henry Woods Promenade Concerts, to give the official title, started as a lighter summertime diversion to bring audiences into the then-new Queen’s Hall, near Oxford Circus in London. The cheapest tickets were sold as standing room on the promenade part of the main floor, and the name stuck. After a Nazi V-2 bomb destroyed the hall, the Proms moved into the cavernous Royal Albert Hall. The Albert Hall’s oval shape and flat floor made the standees even more central to the event, visually as well as vocally.
For Spano’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” for example, when the stagehands push the piano on stage and open the lid, expect to hear the Prommers on the floor shout “Heave!” followed by a lusty “Ho!” from the balcony — a tradition of audience participation and fun unlike anything in America. (At the Proms, classical music performances have some of the same urgency and revelry as soccer matches.)
In Atlanta, we talk a lot about how classical music sometimes seems musty to outsiders. Groups like the ASO and Atlanta Opera and Spivey Hall spend countless hours trying to balance lofty artistic standards with the common touch, where great music isn’t intimidating to anyone. We should study how the BBC Proms does it with rowdy success.
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Those Ruthless ASO Chorus Auditions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
Every August, the great Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus holds open auditions. Anyone can join, but everyone has to first pass the rigorous audition, which taunts and torments many wannabe choristers. There’s an article, published today, about it right here.
Then there’s a long story I wrote — published as the A1 “focal point” — about Atlanta’s Infernal heat wave. The best part comes at the beginning, when a roofer in McDonough referenced Dante.
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ASO Flies into Outer Space
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Saturday in Symphony Hall. www.atlantasymphony.org
“Star Wars” bombast and NASA images and hints of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with the dawn of mankind — all this and more came jumbled together Saturday night in Symphony Hall.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert was well attended and adequately performed. On the podium was Laura Jackson, who was making her farewell as the ASO’s assistant conductor, concluding a three-year fellowship. (She’ll be back next spring as a guest conductor.)
A serious talent, she nevertheless couldn’t get the musicians into gear; an evening of space music felt more earth-bound than astral.
Perhaps it was because the programming seemed specially designed to bore the been-there done-that musicians. The young maestra opened with the first couple of minutes from Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” where massive triads depict God’s moment of creation or a sunrise or, in Stanley Kubrick’s film, the evolution of humans. The ASO did it loud. It thundered and throbbed. Two minutes and out.
The swashbuckling main title tune from John Williams’ “Star Wars” soundtrack, from 1977, is a cultural benchmark, and no piece of concert-hall classical music composed in the past 30 years can approach its familiarity with the public. Many reasons can help explain its popularity, but among them is not the slender quality of the rest of the “Star Wars” score.
After the main tune, the ASO played three other excepts from the George Lucas saga. Could “Yoda’s Theme” stand alone as a piece of music, detached from the movie? The ASO couldn’t make a case.
Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” a scenic tour of the solar system via astrology, closed the 90-minute program. Each of the seven movements imagines a planet as a character in its mythical guise, such as martial “Mars, the Bringer of War” or quicksilver “Mercury, the Winged Messenger.” (Earth, not part of the zodiac, isn’t depicted.)
But Holst’s dreamy fascination with our heavenly neighbors, back in 1916, has been replaced with the hard, cold, computerized and sometimes astonishingly beautiful images from NASA space probes.
So Hatch Productions, in Buffalo, N.Y., licensed footage from the Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, Calif., and sequenced them to accompany a live orchestral performance of “The Planets.” A nifty idea, in theory.
Saturday’s show included WSB-AM radio announcer Scott Slade. With his low tenor voice, made memorable by a baritonal richness and a metallic edge, Slade put us “in the mood” by tossing off factoids to arouse our inner space junky.
“Venus,” for example, was no longer the zodiac “Bringer of Peace” but a bright orange rock with an extremely dense atmosphere, scorched by 860-degree temperatures and choked by 300,000 times the carbon monoxide of earth.
But the nagging fault came with the visuals. Great intentions, so-so execution. The trouble with these NASA/”The Planets” shows — they’ve been around for at least a decade — is that there’s too little artistry in how the images are assembled. Saturday’s run paid no attention to the feelings and emotions stirred by Holst’s music. It felt sterile.
Instead, I’d love to see a savvy artist use this spectacular astronomy footage, maybe combined with Holst’s astrology ideas, to create a new work of art. Accompanying a crack orchestra, the project could take off and fulfill the ASO’s ongoing goal of moving the orchestra into the 21st century.
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