Sonic Symphonic Partner

PHOTO BY ROGER MASTROIANNI

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA’S SONIC PARTNER

by Eric Sellen

This article originally appeared in The Cleveland Orchestra’s “A New Century” recording release, 2020.

ROM THE DAY 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 appoint- ment 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 refi ne 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 unamplifi ed lectures and opera performances, both of which benefi t 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 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 fl oor 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 profi le — and he early on identifi ed the dry acoustics of the hall as a challenge to overcome. In 1949, the board com- missioned a study of the auditorium’s acoustics by Cliff ord 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

Case. Shankland’s analysis confirmed the less-than-desirable short reverberation time and presented a number of recommendations, including, once more, the removal of carpeting and curtains on the box seating level (implemented soon thereafter), as well as the proposed outlines for the building of a substantial and fundamentally different stage enclosure. Since Severance Hall’s debut in 1931, the Orchestra had gone through a progression of lightweight stage “sets,” each designed and built to connect visually with the concert auditorium. By necessity, however, in order to maintain the hall’s use for varying kinds of events (including lectures, opera, and dance presentations), these panels and ceiling fl ats were removable and portable — and did not refl ect the richness of the Orchestra’s sound onstage or into the auditorium. Those concert stage sets were placed in front of a permanent plaster cyclorama, sometimes called an “infi nity” wall. It occupied the back of the entire stage and was part of the building’s original design for the purpose of what were then technically-advanced performance lighting eff ects. When left exposed to the auditorium, this large curved wall refl ected and focused some sound, but very unevenly and to diff erent parts of the space, both onstage and in the concert hall. For the Orchestra, the movable panels in front of it successfully eliminated the negative acoustic eff ects of the cyclorama — but added nothing more. Following Shankland’s study, a new concert set was built in the summer of 1953, with heavier wooden materials (plywood, covered in muslin cloth). But the acoustic eff ect still fell far short of the ideal warmth that a longer reverberation time would off er.

BUILDING A NEW SOUND

As Szell worked with his Cleveland musicians each year, he was increasingly pleased with the progress he’d made in honing and developing the ensemble’s playing. And, as the relationship matured in the mid-1950s, he came to understand that Cleveland could become his life’s work. The board and community seemed to fully support his eff orts, and so Szell set out to prove to the world how much could be accomplished in a smaller city in the American heartland.

What was to become a legendary reputation was pursued through radio broadcasts and recordings, through an annual series of concerts at Carnegie Hall, and fi nally, from 1957 onward, through international touring. In fact, Szell’s “Clevelanders” caught many of Europe’s musical kingpins and press off guard, who were quite surprised to experience such polish and fi nesse from an American orchestra — especially a largely unknown one. “They play with the loving spontaneity of a fi ne European orchestra,” wrote one London paper in 1957, “as well as with the discipline, blend, and unanimity characteristic of America.” All the while, Szell was redoubling his pressure on the Orchestra’s board and management to fi nally and fully tackle the stage-shell acoustic challenges at Severance Hall. In the summer of 1958, with money approved, the construction and installation began. Szell was fully engaged in the project and sought assistance from Heinrich Keilholz, who had designed the acoustic improvements achieved in the 1955 re-building of the Vienna State Opera. Both Keilholz and Shankland were involved in creating

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1956

a new permanent shell for Severance Hall — a massive, immovable steel and wood construction, famously fi lled with tons of sand to ensure it would refl ect as much of the Orchestra’s sound as possible into the hall. When fi rst tried out in rehearsal in September 1958, the change in acoustics was dramatic —immediately requiring the musicians to adjust their playing. The ensemble’s location onstage was also shifted, moving the entire Orchestra forward, so that the percussion and brass could be positioned away from the shell’s back wall (which was suddenly fully projecting their sound). The new, refl ective shell greatly boosted the volume and presence of the Orchestra’s overall sound, while requiring the musicians to concentrate more keenly on the smallest details and to listen more intently to one another. This helped them focus on achieving some extraordinary refi nement in balance and dynamics, including learning how to play, at times, extremely softly as a group, especially for the strings. All of this allowed Szell to continue sharpening the Orchestra’s ensemblework and sound, reinforcing their international reputation for clarity infused with a strong sense of European musical panache. In some ways, the 1958 renovation overshot the need, from overly dry to overly refl ective. And in truth, in terms of sound aesthetics, the characteristics of the 1958 shell prioritized the need for orchestral precision and, while not precluding warmth, helped make clarity — for which The Cleveland Orchestra had become renowned — as the fi rst requirement for a balanced sound in the hall. Interestingly, and in a way perhaps even more true today, the skills for listening and the need for clarity also assisted The Cleveland Orchestra to always sound like themselves on tour, regardless of the diff ering characteristics of the many halls they play in when not at home. From the early 1960s onward, with just a short rehearsal in a new hall, Szell (and his successors) could almost always quickly help the musicians fi ne tune the Orches-

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2000

At the behest of George Szell, a new permanent stageshell was installed in 1958 (top left), its wooden walls fi lled with sand to ensure a refl ective surface while bringing a new sense of liveliness to the hall’s intimate acoustics. Its simple and clean lines, however, confl icted with the auditorium’s opulent visual splendor. A new permanent shell (opposite page top), built in 1998-2000, fi nally combined both needs, matching the auditorium’s beauty with modern acoustic surfaces that refl ect and enable The Cleveland Orchestra’s consummate artistry.

tra’s playing to replicate the accuracy and focus that was produced back home at Severance Hall. Thus, the 1958 stageshell carried its imprint forward — through the clarity of Szell, notably extended in newer music by Pierre Boulez (principal guest conductor under Szell, and later a regular guest conductor up until two years before he died in 2016), and on through the daring brashness of Lorin Maazel, up to the well-oiled and disciplined sound honed during Christoph von Dohnányi’s tenure in the 1980s and ’90s. Throughout, the hall intimately involved in refi ning and evolving the Orchestra’s playing.

A MARRIAGE OF ACOUSTICS AND ARCHITECTURE

The third, and current, manifestation of Severance Hall’s acoustics was put into action as part of a buildingwide restoration and renovation undertaken across three seasons, 1998-2000. Inside the auditorium, the project focused on restoring aesthetic beauty, including replacing the stageshell with one designed not only to work acoustically, but to blend visually with the auditorium’s magnifi cent mixture of French Art Deco detailing. The acoustic goals of the project, articulated by the institution’s leaders, especially by Christoph von Dohnányi (music director, 1984-2002) were to retain the important qualities of clarity and presence while further increasing the warmth of the sound. Design plans to achieve those results fell to David M. Schwarz Architects Inc. and the acousticians of Jaff e Holden Scarbrough. The new shell design duplicated almost exactly the dimensions and position of the 1958 shell, while calling for major changes to the wall and ceiling surfaces. The smooth, highly refl ective plywood facade from 1958 was abandoned, replaced by complex and intricate surfaces that diff use the refl ected sound.

Most importantly, a precisely measured proportion of the new shell surface is “acoustically transparent,” allowing the Orchestra’s sound to enliven new reverberation chambers surrounding the shell, including both the former organ loft above the stage and the newly-built organ space behind the stage. These added reverberation areas give the conductor and musicians the ability to adjust, blend, and color their collective sound as they play, and to do so with almost infi nite confi dence and control. Today, the hall’s reverb/decay time measures almost 2 seconds, retaining its intimate immediacy — seating just over 1,900 — while off ering a balanced resonance across the sound spectrum. Just as the 1958 stage construction helped Szell magnify and hone The Cleveland Orchestra’s developing sound, the 2000 renovation of the Severance Hall stage began refi ning the ensemble’s trademark musicality. From 2002 forward, the group’s new music director, Franz Welser-Möst, has been able to initiate and sustain an ongoing evolution in the Orchestra’s sound. His priorities for musical warmth, rhythmic fl exibility, and wide-ranging orchestral color take full and complete advantage of the acoustic properties of the shell, stage, reverberation chambers, and the auditorium itself. Thus, as The Cleveland Orchestra embarks on its second hundred years, Franz Welser-Möst’s focus on collaboration, his encouragement of the players’ expressive range, and his trust in their collective sense of musicality, are continuing to evolve standards recognized around the world. And the acoustics and visual charm of Severance Hall are important touchstones in off ering audiences — and everyone onstage — a uniquely warm and clarifying sound that is The Cleveland Orchestra.

Eric Sellen served as program book editor for Th e Cleveland Orchestra for 28 season before retiring in September 2021.