The fabulous new Schermerhorn Symphony Center (SSC) is now open for business, and having attended two concerts and one event there in a couple of weeks, I’m thrilled to know that I’ll be there a lot in the years to come. 
It’s a relaxing, inviting vessel for acoustic music of all kinds, a lively, responsive room that seats 1,900 people yet still retains a feeling of intimacy.
The story line that some in the New York press found in this special event was all-too predictable and facile. For a half century, northern culture know-it-alls have dismissed Nashville’s fine arts and over-amplified its hillbilly corn out of some need to frame this city’s story in an easy-to-digest myth. The debut of a sensational symphony in a new and exciting concert hall was instead covered by the New York Times as a man-bites-dog news item. (Classical music in Nashville? Ain’t that precious!)
The fabulous new Schermerhorn Symphony Center (SSC) is now open for business, and having attended two concerts and one event there in a couple of weeks, I’m thrilled to know that I’ll be there a lot in the years to come. It’s a relaxing, inviting vessel for acoustic music of all kinds, a lively, responsive room that seats 1,900 people yet still retains a feeling of intimacy.
The story line that some in the New York press found in this special event was all-too predictable and facile. For a half century, northern culture know-it-alls have dismissed Nashville’s fine arts and over-amplified its hillbilly corn out of some need to frame this city’s story in an easy-to-digest myth. The debut of a sensational symphony in a new and exciting concert hall was instead covered by the New York Times as a man-bites-dog news item. (Classical music in Nashville? Ain’t that precious!)
“One is happy for Nashville, its dignified new hall and the citizens who obviously take it seriously,” wrote a condescending Bernard Holland in the New York Times on Sept. 11. Then he sniffed at the building’s architecture, the opening night program, the Edgar Meyer/Bela Fleck/ Zakir Hussain triple concerto, and the hall’s acoustics.
Holland’s points about the building’s exterior, especially its heavy reliance on classical forms, are half of a legitimate debate. My wife agrees with his assessment that “it is still a hall about other people’s halls. It has no point of view.” And I too question the point of the big Elgin-marbles-like frieze above the main entrance and the stuffy fountain out front. But the building is actually more modern than it appears on first glance. It has wonderfully clean fenestration (windows), and I especially like the updated Egyptian-revival columns borrowed from the First Presbyterian Church a few blocks away, one of Nashville’s finest buildings. But what Holland fails to acknowledge is that the SCC defines one edge of a downtown park surrounded by modernity already – the boldly iconographic Country Music Hall of Fame and the sweeping, hovercraft-age Gaylord Entertainment Center, which I like more every year. This makes the SCC’s colonnaded courtyard an absolutely stunning and grounding component of the cityscape.
Moreover, when Holland critiques the interior of the Laura Turner Concert Hall as a borrowing of the Muzikverein, he seems to forget that the world’s best sounding symphony spaces are built to shoebox-like dimensions for a reason, the same reason that experimental, expensive and minimalist concert halls often get criticized for inferior acoustics. Just as the design of cellos and violins was settled on years ago, the best sounding acoustic spaces were perfected long before the computer-aided design era. I doubt Mr. Holland would approve of a chic new design for a grand piano if it didn’t sound as good. What I heard in the LTCH, first on a preview concert with Mahler and then during a regular concert with soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet amazed me. The symphony sounded alert and alive in a way it never did for me in the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. My seat behind the orchestra for the second concert was especially exciting during the fifth Shostakovich symphony.
A much warmer and insightful review came from Michael Linton in the Wall Street Journal. “Every sound is ot only heard but felt,” he wrote on Sept. 12. “When the orchestra was joined by its chorus on stage and brass scattered on balconies, Mahler’s vision of resurrection was both explosive and ethereal.” Linton actually lives near Nashville, but let us hope it wasn’t only home-town boosterism that shaped how he heard the concert. I believe him when he says he saw a symphony “poised to become one of the country’s leading orchestras.” I won’t hold him responsible for the appalling Journal headline, “Nashville Goes Classical.” Written by a New Yorker, it once again falls back on the cliché. Nashville started classical and added country music to its repertoire in the 1940s. It didn’t “go” classical this month any more than I did.
Finally, for really complete coverage of the SSC, I’d draw your attention to Drew McManus, an ArtsJournal blogger who took his Adaptistration weblog on location to Nashville for pretty much every event connected with the grand opening. He saw the opening night program three times and offers a patient review of the acoustics from many different seats. His delight at the whole journey, his lack of pretension, is up to the event. Here’s his conclusion.
In the end, I think the Laura Tuner concert hall is a fabulous space. I'll examine some of the visual aspects which contribute to that opinion in a future article but from a listening perspective, the hall is home run (albeit just over the fence, not out of the park). As the ensemble continues to explore the hall's potential and work with the acousticians, I'm confident that they'll find a way to exploit all of the positives and marginalize any negatives while simultaneously finding ways to even out fluctuations in the listening experience. Even so, this hall is worth going out of your way to experience.
Happily I don’t have to go out of my way. The SSC is a mere mile away from our home, and I intend to visit often.
Comments