The Globe on acoustics of the hall:
What first-night jitters sound like
Why does COC boss Richard Bradshaw think it's too early to invite the public, and critics, inside?
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
They've cut ribbon and made speeches, and thanked everyone they could think of who contributed to the spanking-new opera house that stands ready for business on Toronto's Queen Street West. So why is the Canadian Opera Company so keen to get everyone to calm down, and not be too quick to judge what they hear during this week's inaugural performances at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts?
Preconcert jitters alone can't account for the qualms expressed by Richard Bradshaw about what some people (critics especially) may conclude after hearing a few arias. The COC's general director seems convinced that the house is a winner, but he also insists that a new hall takes time to reveal itself fully, to audience and performers alike.
"It's still a work in progress," Bradshaw said, and he wasn't referring only to the hall. After decades of pushing out enough sound to fill the unresponsive Hummingbird Centre, he said, the musicians of the COC's resident orchestra are going to need time to discover how much is enough in the new building, which hosts its first public concert tonight.
They'll have to learn how to react to what they hear, from each other and from the stage. They've even got to sort out where to sit, and how to play from different parts of the pit, at different elevations relative to the stage. Bradshaw and his company have spent the past several weeks racing to assimilate as much as they can about their new digs, because, ready or not, the first public performance happens tonight.
Who knew that taking possession of a custom-built dream home could be such hard work? When it comes to the acoustics of music theatres, it seems, nothing is easy. Designing them has become an immensely complex task, involving fancy computer models and finicky measurements of everything from reverberation amplitudes to the absorptive qualities of seat cushions. Even things that look like ornaments are tested and tweaked to enhance or at least not impede the optimal movement of sound.
All that complexity is a recent development. People have been thinking about acoustics since the time of Pythagoras, but many of the world's great old halls were built with little detailed insight as to what makes a room sound good or bad.
Charles Garnier, who built the Paris Opera in 1875, tried to be scientific, but he found the acoustical learning of his day so contradictory that he abandoned "this bizarre science" and built according to no theory. "I leave success or failure to chance alone," he said.
Garnier was lucky: The hall was a success. He was also fortunate that nobody asked him to build for an audience of 3,000 (the Paris Opera seats about 2,100). One simple reason so many old halls have good acoustics is that they were relatively small. That's why Bradshaw defended his seating target of 2,000 so fiercely, against those who argued that a bigger hall would be better for the bottom line.
Most 18th-century opera theatres were narrow, intimate boxes. They were usually built for royals who had no need of box-office revenues. The music was also small, with orchestras that were skimpy by Wagnerian standards and instruments that produced softer sounds than their modern counterparts. The box evolved into a horseshoe shape mainly because a bulge in the sides brought the balcony closer to the stage.
Halls started to get big as opera did, though the real pressure for larger buildings came as the burden of patronage shifted from royalty to the paying public, and especially as opera spread across the Atlantic. The multi-purpose halls that housed opera in Canada through the latter half of the 20th century (including Toronto's Hummingbird Centre, Montreal's Place des Arts, Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the two Jubilee Auditoriums in Alberta) were all built with the box office in mind. They all have a fan shape, because trying to stuff nearly 3,000 seats into a narrow box would have pushed the balconies too far back. But fanning the walls out makes them less active as resonating surfaces, which is one big reason why none of these halls has great natural sound.
It starts to look simple, doesn't it? Small and narrow is good; big and fanned out is bad. But a new opera house, even a small horseshoe hall like the Four Seasons, has to be much more versatile than similar halls built in centuries past. Eighteenth-century halls were built for the music of the time. The dry, brilliant sound of the theatre where Mozart heard and approved of a performance of The Magic Flute in 1791 might not have been so flattering to an opera by Richard Strauss, even if Strauss's inflated orchestra had been able to squeeze into the pit.
The Four Seasons was intended to be equally good for Mozart and for Wagner, with a pit that accommodates musicians for either, and a set of acoustical panels that can be adjusted to suit works of any size and character. Like all opera houses, the new hall is also supposed to give instruments and voices enough resonance to engage all listeners, and yet not so much that you can't make out what's being sung.
"I wanted something that was warm and had clarity," Bradshaw said. "I wanted bloom and warmth in the sound, and I wanted to be able to hear each section of the orchestra individually."
He would have liked to keep the public (and especially the critics) out till the Ring cycle begins in September. It will take that long, he believes, for the company to figure out how to use the hall.
"We're going to close the hall for two months [after the concerts] and check every bell and whistle, and the orchestra is going to learn how to play there," he said. "Because it's so sensitive. The great thing is that one knows that one has an incredibly sensitive acoustic."
So there it is, the first review: "an incredibly sensitive acoustic." Of course the nature of that sensitivity, and its effect on the sounds made in the hall, are still to be determined. It will take a long time -- years, perhaps -- for the company to grow into the hall and adapt its sound to it. The concerts this week are like snapshots of a new room with a new tenant. The hard-hat construction is over, but another kind of building process is just getting started.
The COC performs in concert at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts tonight, Friday and Saturday.
AoD