Configured for concerts, Austin's new Dell Hall still sounds like an opera house
May 24, 2008Acoustics is a strange science. Or maybe art. Or faith.
After my first hearing of Austin's 2,400-seat Dell Hall, in an Austin Lyric Opera production of Bizet's "Carmen," I wrote that the pit orchestra "had an attractive bloom," and the augurs seemed good for an onstage orchestra.
I returned to Dell on May 17 for an Austin Symphony concert. Music director Peter Bay concluded his two-year cycle of the Beethoven symphonies with the Eighth and Ninth. The sound was ... strange. So strange that I don't feel comfortable writing a concert review.
For San Antonians, the acoustical results in Austin are of some moment. Bexar County voters on May 10 approved an extension of the local venue tax to fund, among other projects, $100 million of the projected $132 million cost to convert the Municipal Auditorium and the adjacent fire department headquarters into a performing arts center. The plan is to insert into the auditorium a convertible opera house/concert hall seating 1,700-2,000, plus a flexible space seating up to 450.
Dell Hall's usefulness as an object lesson for San Antonio is shaded by the smaller capacity anticipated here. With 400 fewer seats, the San Antonio audience chamber likely would be narrower and, other things being equal, should yield a larger ratio of reflected energy (bouncing off the walls) to direct energy (from the stage). Moreover, the usefulness of my hearing of the Austin Symphony might be shaded by my location smack in the center of the orchestra level. A position seven or eight seats to right or left (nearer my seat for the opera) might have produced a more favorable impression, and a balcony seat almost certainly would have. It's worth noting, too, that an orchestra and its conductor need time to adjust to the acoustics of a new hall. The Beethoven concert was only the Austin Symphony's second outing in Dell.
Up to about a mezzo-piano, or a mezzo-forte in spare textures, the sound was quite good -- clean, open and transparent, with a very nice halo of reflections from the side walls, though not so much from the rear. In the first statement of the "Ode to Joy" theme -- starting with the cellos and double-basses and then adding the violas and finally the violins, all playing at piano -- all the string sections projected well individually and in proper balance with each other. The cellos and violas made a particularly good impression.
But in louder passages and thicker textures, the sound became muddy, closed-in, tubby, a bit harsh and poorly balanced. Certain locations on the stage seemed favored: In tutti passages, most of the sound from the violins to reach my ears came from the last row of desks; I could hear plenty of sound from the double basses, but little from the cellos and violas. The oboes and flutes somewhat outbalanced the clarinets and bassoons.
The solo singers, standing at the lip of the stage, coupled ideally with the hall. Baritone Donnie Ray Albert's clean, bright, focused voice projected especially well, but all four vocal lines were clear in ensemble passages. Albert's excellent colleagues were soprano Mary Dunleavy, mezzo-soprano Dana Beth Miller and tenor Karl Dent. The huge Chorus Austin, standing behind the orchestra, didn't sound as big as its population might suggest, but Friedrich Schiller's German text was always clearly intelligible.
I know from previous experience that Peter Bay is an excellent conductor, and I have to assume that what he heard on the podium must have been very different from what I heard in the middle of the hall. Notwithstanding the bizarre balances, which I can attribute only to the hall itself, Bay's work with the Beethoven symphonies was highly agreeable. There were no interpretive epiphanies -- Bay strikes me as a low-ego, composer's-advocate kind of guy -- but the tempos and tempo relations were well-conceived, the line was always clear and fluid. His orchestra needs some shaping up. Ensemble problems that were obscured in the acoustical blur of the Austin Symphony's former home, Bass Concert Hall at UT-Austin, are much more pronounced in Dell.
The physical arrangement at Dell is fairly typical of multipurpose halls. It's primarily a proscenium theater. For orchestral concerts, an acoustically reflective shell (manufactured by Wenger) is set up behind the proscenium. The shell's walls project sound into the auditorium, and the ceiling keeps the sound from dissipating into the fly loft, so the musicians can hear each other. (That's the theory, anyway.) The walls in the audience chamber are hard plaster applied to concrete block, to minimize the loss of sound energy. (When a more tightly focused sound is desired, for speech or amplified music, much of the hard plaster can be covered with sound-dampening curtains.)
I am not an expert in acoustics, but some aspects of the design seem plausible candidates to explain the odd sound for an onstage orchestra. The first is the fan shape of the seating chamber, wider in back. The most highly regarded concert halls tend to be shoebox-shaped -- the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Vienna Philharmonic Hall, Carnegie Hall. The second candidate is the flatness of the walls and balcony fascia. Good concert halls usually have interior walls that are bumpy, with lots of decorative relief to disperse high-frequency sounds.
Although the amount of Dell's room resonance -- the time it takes a hand-clap to fade to silence -- isn't far short of what one wants in a concert hall, the pattern of reflections struck me as more suited to an opera house. For opera, individual voices on stage have to be clear and intelligible. For orchestral concerts, especially in the Romantic and much of the Modern repertoire, one wants a richer blend and a more enveloping sound.
I am obligated to report that the people sitting around me for the Austin Symphony concert were delighted with the acoustics. That's to be expected. The new hall revealed much that was hidden in Bass. The sound was certainly a lot louder. Too, when people are invested in a new hall, they tend to think or say it sounds great even if it doesn't. For long-term satisfaction after the new wears off, the subtleties become more important.
Mike
Greenberg
