CSO needs a room of its own

Twenty years ago, the sound was even worse.

The acoustic shell the Charleston Symphony Orchestra relies on now hadn't yet been purchased. That was a $300,000 gift from the late Barbara Williams, a devout supporter of the arts, granted to the symphony at the request of its young conductor, David Stahl. The shell, designed to project sound into the Gaillard Auditorium, was state of the art at the time. And desperately needed.

Today, what's desperately needed is a proper orchestra hall.

On Oct. 27, the orchestra, under the baton of Stahl, presented a remarkable and courageous Masterworks program at the Gaillard. It featured Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" and Beethoven's Triple Concerto, played by the College of Charleston's Enrique Graf (piano), Lee Chin Siow (violin) and Natalia Khoma (cello). The musicians played their guts out.

Listening to these favorites, I kept wondering: Maybe the sound wasn't very robust because the players are mostly so young, a little timid; perhaps the Debussy lacked articulation because the orchestra was under-rehearsed; maybe it took the first movement of the Beethoven for the solo parts to condense into a satisfying whole because of miscommunication.

And then, sitting in my cushy seat, looking up for a moment at the high ceiling with its scattered sound panels, observing the vast width of the auditorium space, I realized what the main problem was. The Gaillard is a cruel place for unamplified musicians.

The music, initiated on stage with vigor and purpose, gets soft and flabby as soon as the sound begins its long journey through this municipal auditorium built in 1968, apparently without an acoustician's input.

The notes lose their bite. And their volume. It's as if the dial on your stereo is jammed at No. 3. You want to turn it up badly, you want the music to throb and pulse in the ear, but such hope is futile.

In the Gaillard, what the orchestra actually does and what the audience perceives are not the same. In the Gaillard, it is as if the players sit in a separate space, and we hear them through a sheer curtain, a very unfair situation for the musicians and audience.

On Nov. 1, a clutch of arts advocates visited the Memminger Auditorium downtown. Workers inside were welding steel catwalks across the ceiling and gouging the earth beneath the building in preparation for new toilets.

The $6 million renovation project is being sponsored by Spoleto Festival USA, and Director Nigel Redden was on hand to lead the tour of the facility that once served as a basketball court. Spoleto is raising the money and overseeing the work.

"We took (the project) on ... because no one else would," Redden said. "The idea of losing Memminger was frightening," he went on, referring to the city's shortage of appropriate concert space.

The new Memminger, scheduled to open in time for the 2008 festival, will seat more than 800. It will have new stage storage space, an elevator, garden lobby, geothermal heating and cooling, double sprinkler system and a moveable wall that will enable crews to shrink the performance area for chamber recitals and other intimate programs, Redden said. The auditorium will support staged productions, small recitals and sundry concerts (pops, jazz, dance). All good. But where does that leave the CSO?

In the Gaillard.

David Greenberg, founder of Connecticut-based Creative Acoustics, has worked for years with Redden and the Spoleto team. He's consulting on the Memminger project and has acquired an intimate knowledge of the city's performance spaces.

"The Gaillard was not conceived as a concert hall, but as a multiple-purpose room more aimed at popular culture and amplified events," Greenberg said in a recent telephone interview. "In that respect, it is very successful."

The acoustician said he sets out to achieve three main goals when designing a hall for orchestra: to make it possible for the musicians to hear themselves very well, to make sure they hear one another very well, and to make sure they can hear "the sound of the hall" — not a delayed echo of what the audience is hearing, but what the audience is actually hearing. That way, Greenberg explained, the players sense the effect of the music on the audience.

"There's a loop of confidence," he said. "It's a win-win-win."

The Gaillard is fan-shaped, and that means the energy is sent to the back of the room, Greenberg said. The people sitting in the expensive orchestra seats up front or in the middle "don't get much lateral energy," which is an acoustician's polite way of saying they don't hear the music very well.

It might help if there were a forestage reflector suspended above the stage, projecting sound into the hall and providing the players with "strong overhead reflection," he said.

It also might help if the orchestra had a better acoustic shell behind it. "The house gives (the players) nothing because it's just so big, wide and monstrous."

But those acoustic aids wouldn't really solve the problem, Greenberg said. What's needed is a relatively narrow room in which listeners are immersed in sound.

The Gaillard provides "a monophonic experience" in which the sound exists "somewhere in front of (the audience)," he said. "They are observing something rather than being part of something."

Next year, Stahl celebrates his silver anniversary with the CSO. The symphony has a new executive director (Janet Newcomb), new publicity director (Robin Yeo), new office space downtown and a few new dollars (though more is always needed, Stahl said).

The conductor is planning something special — he's not yet sure exactly what. The musicians will play their hearts out, like they always do, for too little pay and too little recognition. And audiences will fan out through the Gaillard, sit in its cushy seats and strain to hear the details of the music.

Virginia Woolf once famously wrote that the key to a woman's success was to have a sanctuary of artistic expression, a private realm no one else could share, a room of one's own.

Maybe if the Charleston Symphony had a room of its own — finally, after more than 70 years of compromise and accommodation — it could flourish unhindered. Maybe then Charleston's music could be set free, to immerse us all.

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902 or aparker@postandcourier.com.