PHOTO BY ROGER MASTROIANNI
T H E C L E V E L A N D O R C H E S T R A’ S
SONIC PARTNER by Eric Sellen
This article originally appeared in The Cleveland Orchestra’s “A New Century” recording release, 2020. R O M T H E D A Y IT OPENED in 1931,
Severance Hall has played a major role in shaping The Cleveland Orchestra into the ensemble it is today. Indeed, The Cleveland Orchestra’s rise in stature — from a solid regional ensemble to standing alongside the world’s very best — has paralleled a series of acoustical changes and enhancements to its home concert hall, where it rehearses each week and presents a majority of its concerts. Today, Severance Hall continues to play a crucial role in perfecting the Orchestra’s legendary sound. The hall’s newest sonic manifestation, which debuted in 2000, coincided with Franz Welser-Möst’s appointment in 1999 and his taking the artistic helm in 2002, and has enabled him to build on decades of work by his predecessors to further refine The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary sound for a new century. Severance Hall was conceived in the late 1920s and purposefully designed with a relatively dry, nonreverberant acoustic, so that it could be used for a variety of purposes. The planned non-symphonic uses included unamplified lectures and opera performances, both of which benefit from clear articulation and require less reverberation than is ideal for a symphony orchestra. That original dry sound — later measured at under 1.5 seconds of reverb/decay time — has also 24
been traced by some to the needs of early radio broadcasts, which also called for clarity over overall reverberant warmth. (In fact, the Orchestra made radio broadcasts from more than one location in the building, from a special studio built into an upper floor of Severance Hall as well as from the Concert Hall itself; the recording studio was later used for chorus rehearsals and today houses the organization’s fundraising staff.) When George Szell arrived as music director in 1946, his chosen mandate was to raise the level of the Orchestra’s playing and profile — and he early on identified the dry acoustics of the hall as a challenge to overcome. In 1949, the board commissioned a study of the auditorium’s acoustics by Clifford M. Swan, who had consulted on other concert halls across the United States. “Your auditorium is beautiful and luxurious,” Swan wrote to the board, “but it is also ‘dead’.” He suggested removing carpeting and box curtains, but time and budgetary priorities left these ideas undone. Four years later, in 1953, a new study was undertaken by Robert S. Shankland, a physicist at Case Institute of Technology (a forerunner of today’s Case Western Reserve University), who had watched Severance Hall’s construction as a graduate student at
