Seen and Heard Article

A great hall: is it or isn’t it? by Bernard Jacobson

The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer was pretty alarming: “Study: Verizon Hall needs major work on acoustics,” the paper proclaimed on 30 January, over an article by Peter Dobrin, who used to be listed as “music critic” but is now described below his byline as a “culture writer.”

“If God did not exist,” Voltaire said, “it would be necessary to invent him.” As a music critic myself, I have often had the impression that some of my colleagues would gleefully endorse that statement, but with “trouble” substituted for “God” and “it” for “him.” In considering how far alarm is justified, and how far the article may be considered just another example of how journalists enjoy raking muck, a brief outline of the background may be helpful.

For just over a century starting with its foundation in 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra played in the venerable Academy of Music. Already in the early days of the orchestra’s existence, such good judges of acoustics as Leopold Stokowski, who became its principal conductor in 1912, started agitation for a new hall to be built–specifically, a real concert hall, in contrast to the Academy’s character as essentially an opera house pressed into service for concert purposes. It was not until 2001, in large measure as a result of Riccardo Muti’s advocacy during his music directorship (1980-92), that the need was met, with the construction (at a cost of $265 million) of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, one block down Broad Street from the Academy. The architect was Rafael Viñoly, and the acoustician, both for the 2500-seat Verizon Hall and for the 650-seat Perelman Theater designed for chamber music and theater productions, was Russell Johnson of Artec Consultants, already celebrated for his hugely successful acoustical designs in such halls as those of Birmingham in England and Dallas in the US. The orchestra moved into Verizon, and gave its first concert there in December 2001 with then music director Wolfgang Sawallisch.

Now we move from plain fact to the realm of judgment. Acoustics, after all, cannot be restricted within the confines of an exact science. You can measure the elements of sound scientifically as much as you like, but in the end the experience of a concertgoer is a personal matter. There was a good deal of dispute initially about the success or otherwise of Verizon’s acoustics, some critics finding the sound uneven or lacking in “presence,” others (and many orchestra members) expressing more positive feelings. I am only one concertgoer, if an exceptionally experienced one, so that my opinion is necessarily personal. My first reaction was that the hall had the potential to be as great acoustically as it is beautiful visually, but that until the orchestra (and its conductors) grew accustomed to their new environment, there would obviously be a need for adjustments. To my ear, the problem did not lie in a lack of resonance, but rather in a certain fierceness, or glare, in the overall sonority. At that first concert, however, the sound of the orchestra already had more cohesion, color, and impact than it had ever had in the 17 years I had been hearing it in the Academy, where even after some recent structural adjustments it had sounded distant, thin, lacking in body (especially in the bass register), and curiously uncoordinated, with the first violins in particular seeming to be playing in a quite separate acoustical environment from the other sections.

But what needs to be made crystal clear at this point is that, like all Russell Johnson’s designs, the hall’s acoustics were conceived with the explicit purpose of gradual adjustment, using such resources as large resonating chambers with 105 doors that could all individually be closed or more or less widely opened, an adjustable canopy over the stage, and other such elements. Johnson himself said that it would take three years for the best settings for various different orchestral complements and musical repertoires to be found and established, and he has since told me to “keep in mind that my three-year rule doesn’t always work. Sometimes it is five years!”

Starting back in 2001, the adjustment process duly began, with Johnson and his Artec colleagues often in personal attendance. Over the first two years or so, the sound gradually improved, to the point where many of my experienced musician friends in the audience, and I myself, felt that we were getting close to an ideal sound, allowing for the consideration that no hall in the world is perfect – there are always trade-offs balancing one acoustical quality against another. Conductors of visiting orchestras, such as the Royal Concertgebouw from Amsterdam and the Berlin Philharmonic, expressed enormous pleasure at playing in the hall.

Early in 2004, Sir Simon Rattle remarked after his latest appearance in Verizon, “We always knew it was going to be a great hall, and now it is.” That was even before the dramatic change that I, in common with many others, experienced last autumn. With the opening of the Philadelphia Orchestra 2004/05 season, most of what small shortcomings remained seemed to have suddenly melted away. Delighted with the glorious sound I heard that evening, I went backstage to ask music director Christoph Eschenbach what had happened. He told me that he had been equally astonished and pleased at the start of rehearsals. It turned out that, with the installation of the organ console during the summer break, the walls to both sides of it behind the stage had been solidified. The results since then have been consistently thrilling. Among the most satisfying evenings, acoustically as well as musically speaking, was a performance of the Brahms German Requiem, at which not even the fullest fortissimos from a large and well-trained chorus prevented the first violins or the other orchestral sections from sounding out with marvelous warmth and clarity.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not alleging that some chimerical state of perfection has been reached. As Janice Price, president of the Kimmel Center, puts it, “It’s 90 percent there.” Most of those, in the orchestra, in the audience, and from out of town, with whom I have talked about Verizon would agree with that judgment. So you can imagine the surprise, and the concern, when the Inquirer came out with its inflammatory piece and its still more inflammatory headline. Speaking about that when I went to discuss it with him, Joseph Kluger, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s president, characterized Dobrin’s article as “a gross distortion of the context in which the study was made.” Commissioned by the Kimmel Center itself as a confidential document (and leaked by some person unknown to the Inquirer), the report took stock of the point the acoustical adjustment process had so far reached, and of what still needed to be done to improve results from merely excellent to as close as possible to perfect. What the Inquirer article had done, Kluger told me, was to isolate two or three paragraphs from a largely positive 15-page report and present the negatives contained in them as if they were representative of the whole.

Those critical paragraphs enumerated a number of constructional flaws that need to be rectified. Aside from some smaller constructional flaws, it seems that whereas in most Johnson-designed halls the doors to the resonating chambers are made of concrete, in this case considerably lighter materials were substituted. I have not been able to find anyone who can or will tell me (to put it in terms familiar from American politics) how much Johnson knew about such construction compromises and when he knew it. It is clear that some cost-cutting during the hall’s construction led to issues that it will be expensive to address. The report acknowledged further that, in consequence of such issues, the hall suffered from a “low level of reverberance” and a “relatively low level of impact of the orchestral sound.” Here, perhaps, we come back to personal judgments. It may be that “relatively” is the crucial operative word. It is the position of both the orchestra’s and the Kimmel Center’s administration that the hall is already extremely good. It is my own personal position, and one shared with many good musicians, that it belongs among the best acoustical environments to be encountered anywhere in the world.

It is in any case ironic that the Inquirer article was written by the same man to whom it seemed, when Sawallisch and the orchestra held their first acoustic tests, that the chords they played “did something they never had done in the Academy of Music: They lived. They reverberated, they had an afterlife.” As long ago as February 2002, Dobrin went on to say that “The best thing about Verizon is something few people think about consciously, but likely take away with them at the end of the concert: the sense that they have experienced something live and up close in a way not possible with recordings. Verizon is visceral in a way the Academy of Music wasn’t . . . Nothing proved this better than the orchestra’s return to the Academy for its anniversary concert. The orchestra once again seemed quaint and distant.”

The hall, in other words, was visceral three years ago, and now, after adjustments that have been widely noted and approved, it suddenly isn’t. Granted that, as Dobrin himself, citing Johnson, pointed out, “In Verizon Hall, you will never hear the same acoustics twice. Each time you go, the size of the audience and the orchestra will be different, and these body masses will change the sound. Musicians will use different instruments, different mouthpieces and reeds.” All these and other related points are true of Verizon, just as they are of every hall that exists. But none of those circumstances and arguments seem to me to justify the dire assessment that Dobrin and his newspaper now offer.

To sum up, most performers love the sound of the hall – I have not done a statistical analysis, but I have talked to quite a number of musicians, and the word “most” fairly describes the proportion of enthusiasts among them. Most audience members love it. I love it myself. It could be better. At some point, with further adjustment to the positions of doors and canopies, and with or without major expenditure to remedy the acknowledged constructional deficiencies, it probably will be. But as of now, Verizon is a wonderful hall, and it would be a thousand pities if the Inquirer’s horror story were to undermine local confidence and pleasure in its possession.

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