11 minute read
High fidelity
WORDS: MATT PHILP • IMAGERY: DANIEL ALLEN
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After an exacting restoration, a Nelson music institution reopens its doors
Bob Bickerton walks to centre stage and pauses. All around us is construction activity, an aural assault of hammers and saws. A lull, and Bob, who in addition to being a former director of the Nelson School of Music (NSOM) is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, sings into the silence, one note high, one low.
And there it is, that famously resonant acoustic, which experts say makes the Nelson school’s early Edwardian auditorium the best venue in the Southern Hemisphere to play and hear chamber music. At the end of a Herculean, two-year effort to strengthen, restore and improve the school, it’s that ephemeral thing, the preservation of a particular fidelity of sound, that confirms the project as a success.
An unnerving earthquake risk assessment caused the school’s trust board to shutter the doors in 2013. Exacerbated by board ructions and disaffection about strategy, it was a difficult time for the locally loved and nationally significant institution – “the biggest crisis in 120 years”, according to a letter circulated by some of the then board members.
The crisis turned out to be a godsend – albeit with a hefty price tag. In April the renamed Nelson Centre of Musical Arts reopened, earthquake ready and with vastly improved backstage facilities, a state-of-the-art recital building, new roofs, a refurbished organ, 21st-century heating, cooling and seating, an upgraded foyer and a host of other enhancements.
What’s more, the heritage values of the Category 1 auditorium have been not only preserved but enhanced. Original features stripped from the building as part of strengthening works after the Inangahua earthquake of 1968 have been reinstated. Coming on the heels of the redevelopment of the 1899 Suter Art Gallery and the 1878 Theatre Royal, it gives Nelson a trinity of future-proofed heritage buildings within a stone’s throw of the CBD.
“I think there’s been a huge heritage gain here,” says architect Ian Bowman, who wrote the conservation plan for the school and was heavily involved in the restoration aspects.
A bit of history. The school’s origins trace back to a German musician, Michael Balling, a friend of Brahms and Wagner, who in 1893 was invited over by the Nelson Harmonic Society as a guest conductor.
1 The 1913 Cawthron organ has been fully restored.
2 The 1901 auditorium is reputed to have the best acoustics for chamber music in the Southern
Hemisphere.
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While on a hiking break near Mt Cook, Balling’s party became snowed in, and he used the chance to lobby his Nelson businessmen companions successfully on the need for a German-style music conservatory for the city.
In 1901 that school finally got a proper home, an Edwardian classical brick building designed by Frederick de Jersey Clere, with a Marseilles tile roof and decorative pediments, and a handful of studios. The crowning glory was the 450-seat auditorium, whose barrel-vaulted ceiling delivered such impressive acoustics that the venue was soon attracting leading national and international classical performers.
Over subsequent decades, the balance of performance and teaching has shifted (until the 1950s, the school delivered the music curriculum for Nelson’s secondary schools).
In its 21st-century iteration, it is a regional music hub, providing studio space for private teaching, serving as a venue (most notably for the Adam Chamber Music Festival), and running community choral and orchestral programmes, while maintaining a national, even international, reputation.
“It has always been unique in New Zealand Aotearoa,” says Bob.
Hence the expense and effort to save it, beginning in 2014 when the Nelson City Council committed $3 million to the project, subsequently boosted by grants from the New Zealand Lotteries Commission, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, the Rata Foundation, an endowment trust, private philanthropy and public fundraising, for a total budget in excess of $9.5 million.
1 The auditorium (left) and later Kidson Building (right). While the centre’s name has changed, the building is distinguished in that it is being used for the same purpose now as it has had its entire life.
2 Inside the new foyer.
3 Nelson Centre of Musical
Arts Director James
Donaldson (left) and former NSOM director
Bob Bickerton inspect the new recital building during the finishing stages.
4 The foyer, as viewed from the entrance.
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STRIKING THE RIGHT NOTE
Strewn across a trestle table on the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts stage are sandwich bags full of ancient screws – modest but useful ‘heritage’ elements in the reinstatement of the 1913 Cawthron organ following a painstaking restoration by the South Island Organ Company.
As part of that exercise, the sound board has been totally stripped down and the reservoirs releathered, magnets replaced, and new valves put in, all with the objective of returning the instrument to something close to its original state.
In the 1960s a former director had the idea of putting the organ console in the auditorium’s central stalls. Those alterations have been reversed and a new console built based on photographs of the original. Fortuitously, the Timaru-based restoration company had not only kept the original specifications but also held on to the pipework removed in the ’60s.
They haven’t completely turned back the clock, however. “We’re leaving the modern electronic action, which makes it more versatile for so many more people,” says restoration specialist Mike Young.
So how will it sound? “We’re going back to what the original instrument sounded like – a typically late Victorian [sound], slightly mellow.”
Trust Chair Roger Taylor, who took on the role in 2014, says that it became obvious early in the planning process that there was a lot more wrong with the 1901 building than a simple vulnerability to seismicity, and that a significant intervention was required. “We weren’t going to just patch it up; we were going to do it properly.”
Nelson-based Irving Smith Architects handled the project, in collaboration with Ian Bowman. Principal Andrew Irving highlights the complete overhaul of some “pretty Medieval” backstage arrangements, including neck-breakingly steep stairs immediately off stage, poky studios and corridors, and an absence of green rooms.
“We had a great day where we asked, ‘Well, what if half the NZSO turned up to perform? How do they warm up and get on stage?’ It became apparent really quickly that there was nothing we could do with the existing facilities that would allow that.”
There were four structures on site: the 1901 auditorium; Rainey House, a villa acquired in the 1960s to provide extra studio space; a 1971 addition known as the Kidson Building that housed administration and studios; and a foyer added in 1984 to link the Kidson Building and the auditorium.
Rainey House was trucked away and has been replaced by a striking new recital hall building that includes studios, teaching space and green rooms. Critically, it connects to the auditorium at stage level, meaning that all back-of-house facilities are
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now arranged on the same plane, easing access for performers and for the school’s precious Steinway, now housed in a state-of-the-art, environmentally controlled storage room.
The 1984 foyer had obscured the auditorium’s western elevation and blurred the distinction between the 1970 building and its Edwardian neighbour. That’s now gone, and in its place the architects have designed a heavily glazed entry that exposes an expanse of 1901 brick wall.
“We decided that all the add-ons that had accrued since the 1970s should be stripped away and the focus put on the auditorium,” says architect Andrew, who describes the process of entry now as like an “exhibition”, with the auditorium’s brick façade exposed behind glass.
“As you approach the building now, you can also see both front corners and get a sense of how big it is. That had been lost.”
There’s been no attempt to disguise the foyer as anything but a contemporary addition. Likewise with the zig-zagging ‘squeezebox’ form of the new recital hall. That said, the hall’s black brickwork clearly references the auditorium, without aping it.
What of the auditorium itself? Quake-proofing the building proved tougher and more expensive than anticipated, mostly because of deficiencies discovered in the underground steel beams that had been added as part of the 1970 strengthening works. Once they’d been replaced, a diaphragm was laid over the top of the building to connect everything and hold it square, pulled groundward by visually subtle but powerful steel tension rods.
“The act of pulling the existing bricks together makes them stronger,” explains Andrew, who says the same method was used for the brick wool stores on Wellington’s waterfront. In this case, it takes the auditorium up to 85 percent of the New Zealand Building Code.
Inside, the heritage fabric had been “pretty well butchered” over the years, according to Ian. Vertical wall panelling added in 1970 has been removed, and mouldings restored. Busts of Haydn and Beethoven, discovered in a shed behind Rainey House, have
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been replicated and reinstated on their plaster wall mounts above the audience.
At the same time, the functionality of the building – now optimised for an audience of 300 – has been vastly improved with the addition of tiered seating at the rear and thick acoustic glazing, plus a sound system and air conditioning (previously, doors had to be left open during performances on hot summer days).
Many of these changes are imperceptible. Not so on the exterior, where the building has essentially been gifted back its identity. Using historical photographs, all the brick and plaster decorative features removed in 1970, including parapets, finials and cornices, have been recreated in lightweight, fibre-reinforced concrete and put back.
Ian remarks that younger Nelsonians won’t have seen any of these features before. In his own case, he took violin lessons at the school as a child and remembers them well. “This has recaptured the essence of the place when it was first opened, a really impressive Edwardian building that said, ‘This is a very significant institution, and this is what a significant institution should look like’.”
An opening celebration for the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts will take place over the weekend 9-10 June.
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1 New meets old: the black brick of the recital hall echoes the exterior of the auditorium.
2 3 The foyer entrance.
At back left and up close is the 1901 brick wall exposed by the changes.
4 Rediscovered original busts of Beethoven and Haydn have been replicated and reinstated in the auditorium.
5 Bob Bickerton.
6 Ticket stubs for performances at the auditorium dating back to 1904.
OPENING UP
James Donaldson empties an envelope of historic ticket stubs onto his desk, in what for now serves as the administrative office of the former Nelson School of Music. The newly appointed director of the 123-year-old school has arrived at a pivotal moment, just as the school is set to reopen.
His mind is on the future, but the past keeps calling: these tickets, discovered when the Cawthron organ was removed from the auditorium prior to restoration, date back to 1904.
James, previously head of Auckland Grammar School’s music department, has his own history with the school: as a student he attended an early Adam Chamber Music Summer School.
“It really impresses me how Nelson has got behind a project that has not only restored such an important building but extended it in such a sensitive way,” he says of the redevelopment. “It’s going to be a much more functional space, for both concerts and education.”
The question is, what to do with it? “We have a wonderful opportunity. The school’s been running with reduced forces for the last four years, and we could make this as big or small as we want. How do we make use of it? How do we make it available to our community, and also to the rest of New Zealand?”
He has been in discussions with Victoria University and other tertiary music institutions about collaborating. He also sees scope to host more music festivals and has been talking to the likes of national classical guitar and viola organisations.
“When we open those doors,” he says, “we need it to be busy.”
