Making Waves in theNew Millennium: Performing Arts Centers Part I

By Susan Elliott

What’s the latest trend in the performing arts? Regieoper? World music? Dueling Steinways in the Moab desert?

No. It’s bricks and mortar.

In the last 12 months, Copenhagen has opened a new, $443 million opera house; Luxembourg a $136 million concert hall; Cardiff the $195 million Wales Millennium Centre; Strathmore, its $100 million music center. In China, the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center opened in all its $120 million’s worth of glitter, while Beijing’s controversial $325 million Grand National Theatre (a.k.a., “the egg”) steadfastly sticks to its previously announced (but already passed) opening date of 2005.

On tap for 2006 are the $450 million Miami Performing Arts Center, two years late and $101.3 million over budget; a new concert hall and theater at the Orange County (California) Performing Arts Center; Toronto’s first-ever dedicated opera house, the Four Seasons Opera Centre for the Performing Arts; plus fundraising for numerous works in (or almost in) progress, from Atlanta’s $300 million Symphony Center to the Mariinsky Theater’s $440 million renovation; from London’s South Bank Centre fix-up to Hong Kong’s billion-dollar multi-acre Cultural Centre at Tsim Sha Tsui.

There is an unprecedented building boom in the arts, and it shows no signs of abating. Within the last decade at least 60 international concert halls, performing arts centers, opera houses, or theaters have been built, renovated, or a combination thereof. Think about it: Walt Disney Concert Hall; La Scala; the Kimmel Center; La Fenice; New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts; Teatro Real; Lucerne Concert Hall; the London Coliseum; Symphony Center in Chicago; Severance Hall in Cleveland; the Esplanade Theaters in Singapore; the Dome of Sarbini in Jakarta, Indonesia. What is going on here? Isn’t this industry supposed to be in its final death throes?

Minimum scratching beneath the surface reveals a treasure trove of horror stories and victory celebrations, each with its own set of starts, stops, and change orders. About the only characteristic most share (with the notable exception of Asia) is a very real need by an extant group or groups for better space behind the footlights and finer amenities for the ticketbuying public.

RESTORATIONS IN CHICAGO AND CLEVELAND, 1997 AND 2002.

Recalling Orchestra Hall’s evolution into what re-opened in 1997 as Symphony Center, former Chicago Symphony Orchestra President (and current American Symphony Orchestra League CEO) Henry Fogel says, “Every time the orchestra did a big work, we had to take out the first four rows of the orchestra because the stage was too small. So part of the need to renovate was the performance space. Part of it was audience comfort. People are bigger than they were in 1904 [when Orchestra Hall was built], so the seats were too small. The legroom was too narrow. We needed safety updates, more bathrooms.” Also behind the $120 million renovation was the perceived need for an education center (the ECHO project, which has since been abandoned) and improved acoustics in the main hall. (Fogel says they’re better; the local critics initially agreed but have since had second thoughts).

The Cleveland Orchestra’s Severance Hall renovation, completed in 2002, offered perhaps a more delicate challenge. The appearance and facilities of the hall were in dire need of upgrading but the acoustics were to be “retained and enhanced.” In other words, not messed with. “Life is never without risk,” Music Director Christoph von Dohnányi told MusicalAmerica.com just before the hall closed for its $37 million fixup, in 1999. “It is a very young science, acoustics. It’s a bit like psychotherapy—if you go to the wrong one, you are ruined.”

In this case, the patient not only survived but came through the process fully renewed. Says Executive Director Gary Hanson (who oversaw the renovation), “When I think about the relatively small amount of money we spent, what we achieved for it is unbelievable.”

COPENHAGEN OPERA HOUSE; COPENHAGEN, DENMARK.
OPENED 2005.

At the other end of the expense spectrum is the newly minted Copenhagen Opera House, home to the Royal Danish Opera and Ballet. This $443 million glitzy structure is the gift of a single, very wealthy, 91-year-old individual, believed to be Denmark’s richest: Maersk Mc-Kinney Moeller. Here again, the new house came about not so much as a self-aggrandizing monument (although Moeller was hardly a silent partner) as for the Danish performing arts community’s urgent need for space, having long outgrown Copenhagen’s storied (1770) Royal Theater.

NEW JERSEY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS;
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY. OPENED 1997.
Far less glamorous looking, but nonetheless stunning in its power as an urban revitalizer, is the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts (a.k.a. NJPAC, pronounced “enn-jaypack”). Former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, credited with first proposing, in 1987, the idea of an arts center in Newark, has said that NJPAC “exceeded my dreams. There is more going on in that city because of the arts center than I could imagine.” Many canvassed for this article made similar observations.

Opening in fall of 1997 at a total cost of $187 million, NJPAC seems to have gotten everything right, from the beginning. Funds were raised not just for bricks and mortar, but for the first year of operations ($12 million of the total) and the beginnings of an endowment ($3 million); bookings were made with the local community—previously thought of as a third-world country on U.S. soil—keenly in mind. “Their goal was to attract a population within a 25-mile radius,” says Star-Ledger Classical Music Critic Willa Conrad. “They weren’t just looking for a white audience for the classical arts” (although the Center has managed that as well). Programming for the 2005-06 illustrates the point, with a range from Taiwan’s Formosa Aboriginal Song & Dance troupe to Wynton Marsalis to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra to the Felix Hernandez Dance Party.

THE JULIO PRESTES CULTURAL CENTER,
SALA SÃO PAULO; SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL.
OPENED JULY 1999.

If urban revitalization was one of NJPAC’s primary goals, it was an unanticipated byproduct of Brazil’s Sala São Paulo. In 1997, conductor John Neschling was invited to become the music director of the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra), OSESP. The orchestra needed major “renovation,” as he puts it, and Neschling, born in Brazil of Austrian parents (he is the grandnephew of Arnold Schoenberg), was reluctant. “It did not have a proper hall,” he says. “For an orchestra to be good, to develop its own sound, to find its own dignity, it needs a proper hall. So my main condition for taking the job, besides being able to raise salaries and audition new people, was a new hall. And the government agreed—I’m sure they didn’t know what they were getting into!”

After much searching, Neschling and his acoustical consultants (Artec) happened upon a 1920s railroad station in the center of town with a waiting room—atrium, as Neschling describes it—that had virtually the same, “shoebox” dimensions as the best 19th-century concert halls. There were problems, however. One, the building was considered a landmark. “It was very beautiful,” says Neschling. “And very hard to touch.” Two, the station was (and is) still in use; call it Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on a grander scale. Enter the engineers and artisans: The former came up with the idea to dig out the ground beneath the atrium floor and fill it with two “floating” concrete slabs to isolate the space from the noise and vibrations of train traffic. Once the heavy equipment was moved out, the artisans set to work restoring the building to its former, Victorian-era beauty.

Having footed the entire, $35 million bill for this massive project, the Brazilian government owns Sala São Paulo, but the orchestra—whose offices are also located in the center—manages it and presents both its own concerts there as well as those of visiting ensembles.

“Congratulations are in order: lovely sound!” wrote Zubin Mehta in the guest book after conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the hall’s opening concerts in October 1999.

WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL; LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.
OPENED 2003.

“The most celebrated building of the 21st century” is how Los Angeles Times Music Critic Mark Swed describes Frank Gehry’s bold stainless steel sculpture at the corner of Grand and First in downtown L.A. Certainly the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new, $274 million concert hall is worthy of such accolades. The fulfillment of Lillian Disney’s dream of a “world class performance venue” in her own hometown, the structure is as stunning inside as it is out. The 2,265-seat auditorium is a grand bowl of an affair that feels airy and open on the one hand, intimate on the other. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen had suggested to Gehry that the hall be “a living room for music.” And that it most assuredly is. Listening to music in this space (acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota) taps all the senses. Moreover, it has become a major tourist attraction—there are a hotel and a shopping center underway across the street—as well as the anticipated anchor to downtown L.A.'s $1.2 billion revitalization project.

WALES MILLENNIUM CENTER; CARDIFF, WALES.
OPENED 2004.
Funders of the grand new armadillo-like structure in the center of Cardiff also had urban renewal in mind. “A cultural center was actually part of the original strategic plan for the regeneration of the docklands area,” says Judith Isherwood, CEO of the Wales Millennium Center and former director of performing arts for the Sydney Opera House. At the same time, the Welsh National Opera was in need of a home base in Cardiff. “There was no stage big enough for the size company they are,” says Isherwood. “Plus, many large-scale companies that tour the rest of the U.K. never had the chance to come to Wales.”

Construction on the $195 million center, for which the primary funder was the Wales Millennium Commission, began in 2002; its opening took place, with great fanfare, in November 2004. “After 1,350 tonnes of Welsh slate, 300,000 concrete blocks, a million metres of electric cable, and a precisely estimated 231,700 cups of tea consumed since building work started in 2002,” wrote arts correspondent Maev Kennedy in the Guardian, “Cardiff finally has the arts complex that 20 years ago an official report had said was needed.”

The WNO is its primary tenant, but the center’s 1,900-seat auditorium also serves several local dance and theater companies, as well as touring ensembles and Broadway shows. It is early to tell, but Isherwood reports that the WMC is having the desired affect on its environs.