Arguing Acoustics

Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette has an interesting post up on her blog today concerning concert hall acoustics and how much of a difference they really make to an orchestra's sound. Specifically, she mentions that the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, home to D.C.'s National Symphony Orchestra, has long been said to be an extraordinarily difficult place for an orchestra to hear itself. Some believe that the NSO has more trouble playing with good ensemble than comparable orchestras who make their homes in better halls. (Midgette doesn't seem to be buying this, and claims that visiting orchestras frequently play better together than the house band.)

This is a familiar discussion point for most orchestras, and certainly one that's a frequent topic of conversation here in Minneapolis, where Orchestra Hall delivers a big, booming sound to the audience, but forces those of us onstage to rely on a lot of visual cues and the vague hope that the few colleagues we can hear clearly are in the right place and therefore reliable to follow. (Those colleagues are, of course, hoping the same thing.)

When Osmo first took up his post as music director, I remember a lot of questions being shot his way about what could be done, short of building a new hall, to improve our cross-stage hearing. Over the years, we've tweaked things here and there - for instance, we now play with the winds, brass, and percussion on risers, whereas the entire orchestra sat on one level when I first joined up ten years ago - but there are definitely still audibility issues that we all deal with on a daily basis.

Still, Midgette's point seems to be that there are very few orchestras that don't have to deal with an imperfect hall, and the great orchestras find ways to turn even a downright bad hall to their advantage. (The classic example is Philadelphia, where the orchestra's famous string sound, which is big, rich, and full, almost certainly developed as a response to playing their concerts in the now-retired Academy of Music, which, I can tell you from personal experience, was like performing in a concrete bunker lined with lead curtains.) Suck it up, in other words. Yes, it would be great if we all got to spend our lives playing concerts at the Musikverein every week, but it ain't gonna happen, so make the best of what you have.

Speaking of which, I remember a funny story that Osmo told in rehearsal once, when we were having trouble playing something or other as tightly together as we needed to, and some of us were clearly getting frustrated by not being able to hear far-flung sections of the ensemble accurately. He told us that he'd recently been conducting at the world-famous Berlin Philharmonie (considered by some, including me, to have the finest concert acoustics in the world,) when he stopped the orchestra and pointed out that something was not quite together. The concertmaster of the Philharmonic replied without a hint of irony, "Well, you know, in this hall..." The grass really is always greener on the other side, I guess.