It's Raining Concert Halls

The Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.

Top, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, and the view from a balcony inside. This season, its orchestra has more than doubled its ticket revenue.

New York Times
September 3, 2006
In Cities Across the United States, It’s Raining Concert Halls
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Correction Appended

Costa Mesa, Calif.

TALL and silver-haired, wearing a pin-striped suit and the prosperous air of Orange County, Calif., Henry Segerstrom made his way recently to the conductor’s podium of the concert hall that bears his and his wife’s name. Before he could speak, the musicians of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, who were there for the hall’s baptismal rehearsal, applauded and cheered. Mr. Segerstrom, a prominent real estate developer, bowed and addressed them in a soft but steady voice.

“You have been an inspiration from the start,” he said. “We’re in complete control of our artistic destiny. This hall can do anything you guys can do.”

Designed by Cesar Pelli, it has already done something: it has made a splash, with its undulating glass walls, curvaceous tiers, silver-leafed foyer ceiling, chandelier of 300 individual hanging crystal lights and well-coifed public plaza.

But such architecture does not come cheap. The new Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall cost $200 million. Mr. Segerstrom led the drive to have it built and provided about a quarter of the money; other donations came from the county’s wealthy business class. Several of the donors were there with him at the rehearsal that evening, joined by orchestra administrators, builders, designers and the elated music director of the Pacific Symphony, Carl St. Clair.

All in all, it was a scene in an increasingly familiar American civic drama: the building of a new concert hall, a lavish statement of civic pride and cultural ambition.

The new hall (not to be confused with the existing Segerstrom Hall, across a plaza at the Orange County Performing Arts Center) opens on Sept. 14, in the beginning of what will be a banner season for major new performance spaces. Five are opening in North America this fall, at a total cost of nearly $1 billion. They include the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, the new home of the Nashville Symphony, which opens next Saturday; the Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts in Toronto, the new house of the Canadian Opera Company, which had special inaugural concerts in June and opens its first season with a Wagner “Ring” cycle later this month; and the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, which comprises both a house for opera and ballet and a concert hall and opens officially on Oct. 5.

The stories behind these buildings show the wide array of hopes that a community invests in a new performing space, even at a time when many fret that classical music is becoming less relevant.

As concert halls have evolved into multipurpose destinations — complete with chic restaurants, bars and the inevitable education centers — local officials and business leaders have come to view them as a chance to revive a downtown or add luster to their city. Orchestra administrators see a draw for new audiences and a means of raising their group’s profile. Music directors envision a platform to artistic greatness. Orchestra members hear wonderful new acoustics. The music-loving public looks forward to more and better concerts.

“There’s a sense that a concert hall can truly enrich a community,” said Deborah Borda, the president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “People have seen successful examples of that, and they aspire to it.” She should know: the orchestra’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened in 2003 and was designed by Frank Gehry, has quickly become a cultural touchstone, attracting full houses and plenty of buzz.

Visually arresting concert halls with sophisticated acoustical setups have also opened in Philadelphia; North Bethesda, Md.; Fort Worth; and Omaha in the last eight years. Atlanta is raising funds to build a hall designed by Santiago Calatrava.

“It’s a great expression of optimism in the art form,” said Gary Hanson, the executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra. For any orchestra that aspires to greatness, he added, a hall to match is a prerequisite.

Yet for all the boosterism behind new halls and the hoopla surrounding their openings, some observers call for tempered expectations.

“A new theater is not automatically simply great news,” said Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, an organization serving opera companies nationwide. When a hall is added, he said, it may just divert audiences and their dollars from other performance and cultural institutions.

“This is all redistributing people’s expenditures from one activity to another,” said David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who focuses on the arts.

Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of “Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding,” said there was little solid research measuring the economic impact of arts centers on a city, although there was for sports stadiums. Such research shows no benefit for a city’s growth, he said, adding that he was skeptical about economic claims for new concert halls.

“The glorious tales are typically exaggerations,” said Mr. Cowen, who also contributes a monthly economics column to The New York Times.

A look at how the new halls came into being reveals a pattern.

An orchestra outgrows its old multipurpose hall. A powerful person steps up with drive and money. The planners woo local officials and donors. A celebrity architect is engaged. A large public relations firm begins an expensive campaign trumpeting the architectural and acoustic glories of the new hall.

Nashville followed much of this script. In the spring of 2000 the Nashville Chamber of Commerce arranged for city leaders to visit Seattle in search of ideas about civic improvement. The last stop was a visit to Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony since 1998. The visitors heard a rehearsal of a Beethoven symphony, said Alan D. Valentine, the president of the 60-year-old Nashville Symphony and a member of the touring group.

“They were just blown away by the quality of the building,” he said. The visitors were then polled on the top five ideas they could take back to Nashville. A dedicated concert hall was No. 2, behind public transportation. “I said, ‘Oh my God, they got it,’ ” Mr. Valentine recounted.

That September he took the orchestra, which used to play in the acoustically and architecturally drab Tennessee Performing Arts Center, to Carnegie Hall, and 1,100 Nashville citizens and orchestra supporters went along. “It was the Carnegie Hall concert which really helped the board and leaders of the community to understand how a good orchestra can sound in a good space,” Mr. Valentine said.

Board members, administrators and designers toured Europe’s best halls. Martha Ingram, a wealthy orchestra supporter who was the companion of Kenneth Schermerhorn, the orchestra’s music director for 22 years, provided $30 million to the project. Mr. Schermerhorn, who died last year, was instrumental in building the orchestra’s quality and reputation.

“What really matters is doing this project in a way that will benefit Nashvillians and make things better here,” Mr. Valentine said. “That’s ultimately what we are, community servants.”

The neo-Classical limestone-clad hall is in keeping with the character of Nashville’s other civic buildings. It has the natural light of the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna and the alcoves and intimate lobby seating of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

“They were looking for a building that would appear timeless and not be dated 10 years after opening,” said Craig P. Williams, the project manager for the architectural firm, David M. Schwarz.

Then the Nashville Symphony, like the Orange County Performing Arts Center, hired an outside public relations firm, Ruder Finn, to promote the hall, arranging meetings with reporters in New York well in advance.

Mayor Bill Purcell of Nashville said the city’s investment of $16 million so far and the private money spent on the hall were worth it. “For me, this is really the last essential part for our being the Music City,” he said. Along with the Grand Ole Opry and other bluegrass and country music sites, “this particular symphony hall frankly finishes out that range of venues, of special places, that we had to have,” he said. “We needed this, and we needed it now.”

Mr. Valentine added: “The hall itself is a great reflection of what Nashville feels about its orchestra. That’s good for our long-term well-being, financially and otherwise.” This season the orchestra has more than doubled its ticket revenue, a development that Mr. Valentine attributes to excitement over the hall. The orchestra will present about 100 concerts a season, instead of the previous 65.

But the hall will cost more to run: about $2.5 million in the orchestra’s budget. The orchestra hopes to make up the difference with rentals, more ticket and endowment income and annual giving increases, Mr. Valentine said.

BEFORE construction of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts could begin in Miami, backers commissioned at least three economic impact statements to convince public officials that it would improve depressed downtown Miami streets the way Lincoln Center did for part of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“That’s been a strong argument here,” said Michael Hardy, the Carnival Center’s president and chief executive. “We’ve used it a lot.”

A study by Michael Connolly, an economics professor at the University of Miami, said the center would generate $122 million annually for businesses in the area and $6 million in taxes, and add 1,059 jobs. Professor Connolly said it had stimulated development in the depressed area around it and had helped push up property values at a faster rate than in the rest of Miami. Already 35,000 condominium units have been built within a 15-block radius of the center, Mr. Hardy said. But Professor Connolly’s estimate of $491 million in new building investment fell below the expectations of its backers.

The Carnival Center also came with huge cost overruns. It was budgeted at $255 million but rose to $461 million. “It was a much harder building to build than people realized,” Mr. Hardy said. Most of that money came from the proceeds of a local hotel tax, along with $85 million in private, corporate and foundation money.

The Miami center is an anomaly. There is no resident orchestra, although the Cleveland Orchestra will have a yearly three-week residency, and the New World Orchestra, a training group, will also play there regularly. Barely two-dozen classical concerts will be presented this season. The rest is mostly jazz, world music, Broadway shows and popular entertainers. The resident Florida Grand Opera and the Miami City Ballet will benefit the most.

Some arts groups in Miami have argued that some of the vast amount of money raised for the center could have gone to pay musicians, dancers and singers.

“Concert halls are needed, but when concert halls are sucking up all the money of a community, I don’t believe they are really serving the community,” said Luciano Magnanini, the former principal bassoonist of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, which declared bankruptcy in 2003. “Great civilizations are known for their culture. They’re not known for the money. I don’t know anybody who goes to Florence because the Medicis were great bankers.”

One important motivation in Orange County was to free up space in the existing Segerstrom Hall, which plays host to touring Broadway shows, a concert series and the Pacific Symphony: more than 350 performances a year. Since the old hall was built in 1986, the county’s population has increased 50 percent, to three million, creating more demand for seats.

The orchestra was chafing. The hall was so overscheduled that musicians had to rehearse in a former church. And it was so big that it did not fit smaller works, like Mozart and Haydn symphonies, putting a damper on the orchestra’s development, said Mr. St. Clair, the longtime music director. Founded only in 1978, the Pacific Symphony lacks a major national profile and pays by the service, meaning that the members, many of them crack Los Angeles studio musicians, do not receive fixed salaries like players in major orchestras. But it has big ambitions and has come up with innovative programming.

“We had reached our plateau,” said John Forsyte, the orchestra’s executive director. “We’re just trying to catch up to where an orchestra like the Boston Symphony is.”

Mr. St. Clair holds a yearly American composers festival and has released several recordings and produced important commissions. The orchestra’s patrons raised money to send it on a European tour this summer, a calculated maneuver to attract attention, lift orchestra morale by letting it play in first-rate halls and give it experience in adjusting to new spaces.

“We have a golden opportunity to take our young history and mold ourselves,” Mr. St. Clair said. “This is much more than a building. I really hope this will be the breath and soul of Orange County.”

But the orchestra’s situation is not ideal. It holds a year-to-year lease with the center, which has ultimate say in programming.

The hall was built on former lima bean fields owned by the Segerstrom family, which transformed farmland into the sleek office buildings, malls and arts hub of Costa Mesa’s downtown. Mr. Segerstrom, 83, a competitive man beneath his patrician exterior, says the performing arts center is part of his vision for Orange County. He calls it the “symbol of Orange County’s pride and self-esteem.”

He and other backers also hope that it will give a focus to the county, an agglomeration of nearly three dozen towns flung south and east of Los Angeles, and help lift it out of that city’s shadow. Mr. Segerstrom said the new hall was mainly a source of cultural distinction but acknowledged that well-heeled concertgoers would be welcome in his company’s luxury South Coast Plaza shopping mall next door.

All told, he put up $50 million for the new hall. But later fund-raising lagged, forcing backers to scrape up donations to meet interest payments on construction bonds. Still, few expect Orange County’s wealthy pillars to let the campaign fail.

During the first rehearsal, of Holst’s “Planets” and “Shooting Stars” by Frank Ticheli, the orchestra came out full of smiles. Backstage, wine bottles with yellow caution-tape bows stood in rows.

Mr. St. Clair, began the rehearsal with a carefully considered passage, the lush, regal theme from the “Jupiter” movement of “The Planets.” The musicians were impressed by the sound, some saying they could hear one another for the first time and play softly with ease.

Mindy Ball, a harpist, teared up. “It’s a musical jewel,” she said. “It’s for the 21st century, and it’s all ours.”

Correction: September 3, 2006

Because of an editing error, an article today on the cover of Arts & Leisure about new performance spaces opening this season misstates the date of the debut of the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, Calif. It is Friday, Sept. 15, not Sept. 14.