Greg Stepanich

New Miami concert hall's a beauty

The new Knight Concert Hall at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts at 13th and Biscayne in downtown Miami is a thing of sonic and architectural beauty, and South Florida audiences now have another fine venue for concertgoing.

On Sunday morning, I went down to the hall for a "tuning of the house" event, in which the Cleveland Orchestra was on hand for a two-hour rehearsal to give engineers and an invited audience to check out the quality of the sound. CSO music director Franz Welser-Möst, looking comfortable and collegial in a yellow short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans, led the orchestra in music by Bruckner, Prokofiev and Verdi.

(I took some weak pictures but haven't had a chance to download them. That's an illustration above.)

I missed the Bruckner (the Fifth), and was roundly abused by colleagues for being tardy (but car trouble is car trouble). But I did hear the Prokofiev — two big excerpts from the Romeo and Juliet ballet music — and the Verdi (a brief snatch or two from Falstaff), and the sound was marvelously clear; I wandered around the back and sides of the main floor and could hear a blended picture everywhere I was.

A word here about what a first-time visitor sees upon entering the house. In some ways, it's like nothing so much as a 19th-century lecture hall, with seats spread out in curved rows facing a stage very close to the front. It's spacious but intimate at the same time.

There also is a large amount of blond wood everywhere you look (what Carnival executive director Michael Hardy called the "psychoacoustics" of the house), from all the stairs to the huge fabric-covered sound panels, to the inlays in the boxes, to the giant canopy that hangs over the seats. It's a great oval with concentric-circle panels hanging from it, and it adds to the dual sense of bigness and personal detail you feel sitting there.

The sound of the house seemed to me Sunday to favor the strings in particular. Each entrance in the Prokofiev was rich and wonderfully alive, with all interior voices clearly audible. You could also hear the adjustments being made as the orchestra played — the sound panels are altered as the music goes along by a two-person team in the booth at the back. And so the echo that appeared at the beginning of the Prokofiev and made the orchestra sound as though it wasn't playing together had largely disappeared a few minutes later.

I found myself able to hear parts of the orchestra that get lost in a bigger, mushier hall with great distinctness in the Knight. The contrabassoon, for instance, was easy to hear, and moments later, as the orchestra shifted to the Verdi and the contra was lugged off, you could hear the big differences in orchestration style.

The difference was almost revelatory: the Verdi was clearly the work of a writer working in a much older tradition, while the Prokofiev had a much more elaborate palette of color.

In short, a beautiful house, and one that will no doubt serve the Clevelanders well in their 10 years of residency. Everyone connected with the orchestra seemed quite happy with the results and Welser-Möst himself, in brief remarks to the audience, declared it "a great hall," and initially that's what it appears to be.

Some other good news at the press conference afterward came from Robert Conrad, the longtime voice of the orchestra's radio broadcasts, who said WCLV would be working with WLRN to broadcast the Cleveland Orchestra's concerts live from Miami, which is a nice coup for the city and for the orchestra.

Also, William Hipp, the director of the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, said that members of the orchestra would be working with senior composition students at the school in rehearsals of their new work, which warms the heart of a composer and advocate of new American music like me. This is a terrific opportunity for those students, and I hope they take full advantage of it. Finish those sonatas, folks!

All in all, a worthwhile trip down south, and residents up here who are interested in seeing a great American orchestra in a splendid new setting should find the extra preparation and travel time well worth it. I only regret that the Florida Philharmonic is no longer around to call it home; it would have been a well-earned reward for some excellent local musicians, and a chance to really take that orchestra to new heights.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else who's heard the new hall and wants to comment. Post your thoughts below.