New Concert Venue 'A Beautiful Beacon'

by James Chute / San Diego Union-Tribune
September 18, 2006

COSTA MESA - There was lots of big news in Orange County last week.

Rupert the black swan, who for 15 years had been an icon in Newport Harbor, was run over and killed by a Harbor Patrol boat.

Also in Newport, the Balboa Fun Zone closed to make way for a nautical museum.

And in "The City of the Arts," also known as Costa Mesa, the Pacific Symphony opened the new, $200 million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall Friday and Saturday nights in stellar programs featuring Placido Domingo, Midori, and premieres of new works by William Bolcom and Philip Glass.

"We have many wonderful things in Orange County," said Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair Friday, his words forming a counterpoint to the sounds of work crews trying to finish the hall in time for the opening. "But today is the day culture becomes an equal partner with all the other things Orange County has to offer.

"This is a defining moment for Orange County, and this hall is a beautiful beacon for the arts. It will be our Olympic torch."

Henry Segerstrom was equally effusive, calling the new hall, and the Orange County Performing Arts Center complex that envelops it, Orange County's "cultural heart."

Locating the heart of Orange County, cultural and otherwise, has always been a recreational activity for OC residents. Some would argue for Disneyland. Or the Crystal Cathedral. Or perhaps the Segerstrom family-owned South Coast Plaza, just a couple blocks from the Performing Arts Center, which now has two halls bearing the Segerstrom name.

There's been a decided drift, however, in the county's center of gravity toward south Orange County, where the Segerstroms' arch competitor, the Irvine Company, is more dominant. Arresting that southward slide may have helped motivate Segerstrom to donate $50 million toward the Performing Arts Center's expansion, bring on board his favorite architect, Cesar Pelli, and for good measure, commission a monumental sculpture by Richard Serra.

If Serra's "Connector," with its five, 66-feet-tall torqued steel plates, offers a bold challenge to everything surrounding it, Pelli's structure, with its undulating glass, is more congenial to its surroundings. And its interior, with multiple balconies that allow patrons to both see and be seen, is a throwback to European concert halls.

Still, whatever the cultural, political and economic forces that brought it into being, the hall excels where it matters most: in the way it sounds. It is, above all, a musicians' hall.

Designed by Russell Johnson of Artec Consultants, the hall's acoustical features include large reverberation chambers on either side and an adjustable canopy above the stage.

Johnson, at the intermission of Saturday's concert, said he was encouraged by what he had heard, but it would take the orchestra "two or three seasons to really get used to this hall. But I know what it can do."

It did plenty Friday and Saturday night. The room has remarkable warmth and resonance, which allows the musicians to play without forcing their sound. At the same time, the room has unusual clarity, a quality sometimes elusive in lively, reverberant spaces.

The hall's refined nature might seem to go against the Pacific Symphony's brash, individualistic character. This is (or was, before this hall) an ensemble of soloists. Chair for chair, it includes some of the finest musicians anywhere, many of whom make a living doing studio work in Los Angeles.

Melding these individuals into an ensemble has always been St.Clair's primary challenge with the Pacific Symphony, an ensemble that was deemed unworthy to open the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1986, a task that went to Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But St.Clair's done a remarkable job, leading the ensemble in several major-label recordings of contemporary music and recently taking it on its first European tour.

In Friday's concert, St.Clair may have been a little too careful about making making sure every musical detail was in place. After leading the orchestra and the Pacific Chorale in a definitive reading of "The Promise of Living" segment from Copland's "Tender Land," St.Clair was never quite able to get Bolcom's "Canciones de Lorca" off the ground.

Domingo sang with the ardor and finesse you would expect from the first among the Three Tenors, but the individual pieces never coalesced into a unified whole. And the Mahler Symphony No. 1 that closed Friday's program also seemed a bit micro-managed, no matter how impressive the closing sections.

It was only with Saturday's concert, in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, that the orchestra's and the hall's true capabilities became evident. The concerto has its share of high notes for the soloist, which even in the hands of the most masterful violinists are too often strident and forced, such is the need to project them into large, contemporary concert halls.

But because of the acoustics (and the way they ever-so-slightly sustained the tone, rather than immediately cutting it off), an inspired, impassioned Midori was able to float those notes in perfect, bell-like, spine-tingling passages.

St.Clair slowed the second movement almost to the breaking point, but Midori stayed with him note for note, sustaining each line even as the slow tempo and St.Clair's deliberate, measured approach threatened to pull it apart.

But in the third movement, St.Clair set the tempo, and stepped back just a bit, allowing the orchestra to dance. The strings, with their burnished, perfectly blended sound, could have been straight out of Philadelphia; the winds, with their crisp ensemble and sense of presence, from Cleveland; and the brass, Chicago perhaps. It sounded just about as good as it gets.

In Glass's "The Passion of Ramakrishna," aided by an energized and exacting effort from the Pacific Chorale, it only got better. (Memo to the chorale's wardrobe coordinator: Lose the tacky, sequined tops. Please.) When the Glass piece finally breathed its last, and St.Clair lowered his baton, there was only silence in the hall. Absolute silence. And then a thunderous ovation began.
In those few moments of quiet, you could almost hear a heart beat.