Hall gives Parry Sound new meaning

William Littler / Toronto Star (July 21, 2003)

PARRY SOUND-Call it a tale of two windows.

The T-shirt in one downtown store window bore the message "I survived symphony hall." The flyer in a neighbouring store window bore the message "Stockey soars! We shoot, we score!"

No one in Parry Sound this past weekend needed an interpreter to explain the meaning behind the glass in either case.

For 23 years, The Festival of the Sound, Northern Ontario's major summer musical event, had set up shop in the gymnatorium of Parry Sound Secondary School, somewhat less than affectionately nicknamed symphony hall.

During almost all this time, summer after sweltering summer, festival supporters had dreamt of the day when they and the music could move into a real concert hall.

That day arrived Friday with the inauguration of the town-owned Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts, a $12.5 million (actual construction cost $9.8 million) facility housing, in a peculiarly Canadian way, both the Charles W. Stockey Festival Performance Hall and the Bobby Orr Hockey Hall of Fame.

Both of the facility's namesakes were present for Friday's three-hour gala opening concert - Bobby Orr, the player from Parry Sound whose overtime goal won the 1970 Stanley Cup for the Boston Bruins, and Charles W. Stockey, the 86-year-old former Toronto Star executive and long time Festival of the Sound supporter, whose $1.7 million personal donation spearheaded the building campaign.

Contributions from all three levels of government were instrumental to the campaign (which still has $1.2 million to raise) and the decision to enter into a marriage of convenience between music and hockey to construct one building.

Nestled on the shoreline of a protected bay on reclaimed fuel depot land, it is a peaked roof building obviously influenced by the cottage architecture of the region, clad in red coloured corrugated metal panels and gray fibre-cement siding.

A three-storey common lobby with glass walls overlooking the water is shared by both the hockey museum, with its collection of Bobby Orr memorabilia and interactive games, and the 480-seat performance venue, strikingly sheathed in rough-hewn, locally quarried stone beneath a cross-beamed roof of British Columbia softwoods.

Because of its dual purpose, design of the structure was assigned as a joint venture between the Toronto firms of Keith Loffler Architect and ZAS Architects, the former remembered as design director for Arthur Erickson's Roy Thomson Hall project, the latter experienced in community and recreational projects across Ontario.

Loffler's interior for the performance hall took inspiration from the du Maurier Theatre Centre at Harbourfront Centre, its tall rectangular configuration and two levels of narrow surrounding balconies also conforming to the classic shoebox shape championed by North America's pre-eminent firm of acoustical consultants, ARTEC of New York.

"Several years ago when we began looking at architectural proposals," artistic director James Campbell recalled, "I tried to make it clear that if the acoustics are good, the festival will thrive and if the acoustics are bad, the festival will die. Since ARTEC has the best track record, I suggested that whoever the architect is, we should make ARTEC a partner. And we did."

The opening concerts of this summer's three-and-a-half-week Festival of the Sound went a long way toward vindicating Campbell's advice.

The sounds I experienced possessed a combination of warmth and clarity as impressive as I have encountered anywhere in a hall of this size.

And from his player's perspective, Campbell expressed no less enthusiasm.

His obbligato clarinet appeared together with several vocal soloists and the Elmer Iseler Singers under Lydia Adams' direction on opening night in the premiere of Gary Kulesha's setting of a Charles G.D. Roberts poem, Night Watch, returning Saturday afternoon for a program of music inspired by art, titled The Painted Sound. Like the other featured instruments, as well as the voices, it projected in an unforced, undistorted, natural-sounding way in the new hall.

Conscious of the importance of the occasion, the festival introduced a high Canadian content into its opening weekend concerts, including the premieres of Parry Sound composer Eleanor Daley's Paradise: Song of Georgian Bay, set to the words of Eleanor Hunter, and Eric Robertson's The Goal, a tribute to Bobby Orr's famous goal, for narrator (Colin Fox) and brass quintet (from the Hannaford Street Silver Band), set to an amusingly literate text by Gary Michael Dault.

But before any of these performances took place, James Campbell walked out on stage to a prolonged standing ovation and said what many in the audience obviously believed: "Well, dreams do come true."