Orchestra Hall at 50

By Michael Anthony

Could it be, as Orchestra Hall celebrates its first half-century, that we’ve become just a trifle blasé about the Hall’s most striking qualities?

Even the most frequent visitors to the Hall might have forgotten—or perhaps never knew—that 40 or so prominent music and architecture critics attended the Hall’s dedication concert on October 21, 1974, and most wrote reviews of the Hall’s acoustics that bordered on ecstatic. The program, led by the Orchestra’s 51-year-old Music Director Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, consisted of works by Beethoven, Ives and Stravinsky, plus Skrowaczewski’s own orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

“The sound is marvelous,” wrote Andrew Porter in The New Yorker. “It can bear comparison with the best halls in the world—with, say, Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal, Boston’s Symphony Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. This is a place where one can literally hear a pin drop.”

Time magazine called Orchestra Hall “a winner with truly superior sound,” while the critic for United Press International named the Hall “the best of America’s new symphonic auditoriums.” Even that most curmudgeonly of critics, Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times, was impressed, describing the Hall as “something of a sonic miracle.”

Harold Schonberg of The New York Times focused his attention on the Hall’s most unusual visual motif, the huge white cubes—128 in all—tilted in various directions and protruding from the ceiling and the stage’s back wall. The cubes were conceived by Cyril M. Harris, the Hall’s acoustical consultant who was at that time perhaps the most admired acoustician in the world. Among his more than 100 projects were the Kennedy Center and the Metropolitan Opera House. “The cubes work,” wrote Schonberg. “Orchestra Hall has a brilliant acoustic ambience. Harris, a man of science, a quiet man not given to making rash or boastful statements, honestly believes that Orchestra Hall is his chef d’oeuvre.”

FROM NORTHROP TO NICOLLET

Harris, at that time a professor of architecture and chairman of the division of architectural technology at Columbia University in New York City, was hired as acoustic consultant for the Hall in 1971. Skrowaczewski had been lobbying for a new hall for years, a replacement for Northrop Auditorium, where the Orchestra had been playing since 1930. Northrop was the home of the Orchestra during a golden period in the ensemble’s history and was the source of treasured memories for generations of concertgoers, but its acoustic properties for orchestral performances were often critiqued—although Northrop received a radical and successful refurbishment in 2014.

The clock began to tick in 1971 when the Lyceum Theater, the Orchestra’s original home on 11th Street, right where Orchestra Hall sits now, became available for purchase and possible renovation. Harris recalled joining a team of Orchestra Board members as they looked at movie theaters in the downtown area. After a thorough examination of the alternatives, Board members decided that building a new Hall was a more sensible plan than remodeling either the Lyceum or any of the theaters on Hennepin Avenue.

The team of volunteers who raised the money for the Hall worked out a complicated lease-back arrangement with the city of Minneapolis and oversaw dozens of details of design and construction. This group of civic-minded and culturally aware executives and attorneys whose devotion to the Hall project and the Orchestra was tenacious and not a little idealistic.

“The basic conviction here is that cultural assets are important,” said a key member of the team, the late Kenneth Dayton, a generous—and life-long—Orchestra patron and a former Board chair. Interviewed just a week before the hall opened, Dayton recalled that he was in the second grade when he first heard the Orchestra at a Young People’s Concert. He got out of shop class in order to do it. “As a result, I’m a poor do-it-yourselfer,” he said.

A friend of Dayton’s, Judson (Sandy) Bemis—another former Board chair—served as head of the Hall’s finance committee. Bemis spent the better part of a year lugging a cumbersome slide projector and a roll-up screen through the skyway corridors, giving presentations in offices and board rooms on the importance of contributing to the Hall project.  This required stamina, and Bemis was not a young man. Couldn’t he ask an assistant to do the heavy lifting? “No,’ he said. “It’s fun to be part of a team like this.”

By September 1974, just a month before the hall opened, Bemis and his colleagues, among them board chairman John S. Pillsbury, Jr. and House Committee Chairman Stephen R. Pflaum, had raised over 80 percent of the goal of $13.5 million (about $83 million in today’s dollars)—only $7.2 million of which was the actual cost of the building. The remainder was to be spent on land, landscaping, furnishings, endowment and other expenses. (For comparison, the most recent refurbishing of New York City’s Avery Fisher Hall, now David Geffen Hall, cost $500 million.)

WORKING IN HARMONY

One thing was clear as early as 1971. As Dayton said, “Acoustics came before anything else.” If that hadn’t been the case, Cyril Harris probably wouldn’t have taken the gig. “Usually, that’s agreed upon at the start,” Harris said. “If there’s any dispute with the architect, my view will prevail. Without that understanding up front, that can lead to conflict. With two famous architects, I quit. I said at one point, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ and one of them said, ‘Well, we can fix it when it's done.’ I said, ‘Not with me on the job. I’ll resign.’ He said, ‘Go ahead.’”

As far as the project here, no conflicts seem to have arisen between Harris and the chief architectural firm, Hammel Green and Abrahamson of St. Paul and the associate firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer of New York City. “It’s a rare thing where you have a building committee that’s so great to work with as this one was,” Harris said in 1999 when he returned to Minneapolis for the 25th anniversary of Orchestra Hall.

In planning the Hall’s acoustics, Harris’ chief principles were uncomplicated. The shape of the hall needed to be rectangular, what came to be known as the shoebox with three balconies. The materials should chiefly be wood and plaster—no concrete or vinyl—and a minimum of carpeting and plush upholstery on chairs. Winter coats, Harris hoped, would go into lockers along the ring corridor, helping absorb sounds from the lobby. A key element was the cubes—replacing the cherubs, angels, busts and elaborate bas reliefs on the walls and ceilings of concert halls in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“What the cubes do is scatter the sound, which makes the distribution of sound as even as you can get it,” Harris said. “It bounces the sound around in all directions so that it arrives at your ears at all angles. That’s called perfect diffusion.”

Harris, whom Time described as an “acoustic virtuoso,” used the same principals in Benaroya Hall in Seattle, completed in 1998 at a cost of $118 million. He said he thought of the Seattle Hall as sort of a successor to Minneapolis. Not surprisingly, Harris opposed the idea of the multi-purpose hall, much in vogue in the ’70s, and said he wouldn’t work on one. By contrast, another major venue in downtown Minneapolis—the Metrodome—opened in 1982 with multiple sports in mind, but was ultimately torn down in favor of separate football and baseball facilities.

Ground-breaking on the Hall took place June 18, 1973. The speed of construction—559 days—was inordinately fast, “almost a miracle,” said architect Curtis Green. Had they waited another year, he added, the price of steel would have been between 50 percent and 70 percent higher. Orchestra Hall is actually two buildings separated by one inch of air, one inside the other, the auditorium inside the lobby and offices space. This, known as the sound-lock idea, is aimed at keeping noise out of the auditorium.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

It’s worth pondering at this golden anniversary date: what was the effect of the city’s “hi-fi hall,” as it came to be known, especially in the first decade?

For one thing, the Orchestra had to learn to play in this new sound world, one far removed from Northrop. Brass players, which tended to over-blow, had to be toned down. Playing softly on any instrument became an ongoing challenge. (It wasn’t really until Osmo Vänskä took over as music director in 2003 that pianissimos became a signature part of the Orchestra’s expressive range.) It was as if a musician suddenly has a Stradivarius in hand, having played for years on a $100 fiddle. Subtleties were now called for that would never have been heard at Northrop.

While the Orchestra was learning to play in its sensitive new environment, audiences were learning not just to listen, but to stop making so darn much noise. Coughing, wheezing, sneezing—those expressions of bronchial distress commonly heard north of the Iowa border—were barely noticed at Northrop. At Orchestra Hall they were artillery. They were hand grenades flung onstage and exploding, almost always, during the softest, most delicate moments of a symphony or a concerto.

“Once again, the audience at Orchestra Hall spent the entire evening strumming its catarrh,” wrote an irritated Star Tribune critic. (Me.) Skrowaczewski’s successor Neville Marriner, speaking of irritation, finally couldn’t ignore it any longer. He stopped the music one night, turned around, faced the audience and chewed them out for coughing so much and so loudly that, even at the podium he could hardly hear the music.  Some in the audience were offended. Marriner, they thought, was saying they weren’t cultured. Plus, coughing can’t be helped, they said. It’s involuntary. Not so, said a subscriber who happened to be a medical doctor. A cough can be stifled or suppressed.

And guess what? It got better. It took a couple of decades, but today’s audience doesn’t make that kind of noise. They’ve learned to stifle and suppress while listening to a Bruckner symphony. If they’re desperate to cough, they do it between the movements of that Bruckner symphony and at intermission they could open up and let it roar. Was the improvement due to the cough drops that were at one time handed out in the lobby? Or was it something more mysterious? Will we ever know?

What else? Couldn’t we say that Orchestra Hall was at least partially responsible for the substantial increase in the orchestra’s budget and in the size of the audience, as well as in the increased variety of programming and presentations? Surely the wonderful Sommerfest couldn’t have existed at Northrop. And it’s hard to imagine that nearby developments along Nicollet Mall—various restaurants, shops and nightlife—would have taken place without the stimulus of Orchestra Hall. Wisely, the board finally gave up on the idea of putting a restaurant next door on Peavey Plaza, having realized, as one Board member put it, “We’re not in the restaurant business.”

SKROWACZEWSKI’S GIFT

Right from the start 50 years ago, not everyone was crazy about the design—and the look—of Orchestra Hall, the exposed heating and air-conditioning ducts and the idea as expressed in the official design philosophy, said to be chiefly the thinking of Kenneth Dayton, that it should be an “honest” building—a warm, friendly structure conveying “dignity, simplicity and proportion.” Opinions differed widely; one critic writing in 1974 called the design “hideous.”

The $52 million renovation of the Hall, announced in 2010 and completed four years later, added touches of comfort and elegance to the facility. The lobby, always cramped, was doubled in size. Nowadays it’s rare that anyone standing in the lobby spills a drink after getting bumped in the elbow, which seemed to be an inevitability in the old lobby.

Yet there was something worthy in the original design, an idea of some substance. Skrowaczewski, who departed as music director in 1979 and served as conductor laureate until his death in 2017, spoke to me about it in 2014 in what was one of his last interviews.

“You see, for people like Ken Dayton and me and others,” he said, “the Hall was supposed to be a temple of music, a temple of meditation, of spiritual experience. The outer parts, like the lobby, were unimportant. I remember Ken saying, ‘From the outside, it looks like a factory or a school. It’s gray. But when you open the inner door, there suddenly is this wonderful, brilliant hall. Everything changes—spirit and everything.’ This was the idea and I carried it with me. Every time I entered the building through the lobby or backstage, it seemed bleak. But that was unimportant, because then I would open the door and walk into the temple. I still love it and I still feel it.”

Orchestra Hall was Skrowaczewski’s imperishable gift to the Orchestra and to the city that was his home for nearly 60 years.

Michael Anthony served as music critic of the Star Tribune from 1971 to 2007, writing about a wide range of music: rock and jazz to classical and opera. The author of the biography Osmo Vänskä: Orchestra Builder, published in 2009, he has written for numerous publications ranging from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to Opera News, and contributes often to MinnPost. He is also the author of a forthcoming history of Minnesota Opera to published by Wise Ink.

An abridged version of this essay appeared in the September-October 2024 issue of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Showcase magazine.