San Diego’s Jacobs Music Center — formerly known as Copley Symphony Hall — is at last open for business following a $125 million renovation. There were many delays, with the scheduled reopening ultimately pushed back more than a year. The administration of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra (SDSO) reportedly just wanted to get it right, perhaps heeding the stories of other new halls that debuted before they were completely ready.
One part of the original reopening plan remained intact — devoting one of the first concerts in the spruced-up nearly century-old former movie palace to Gustav Mahler’s spectacular Symphony No. 2. The subtitle of the piece, “Resurrection” — to be brought to life by the SDSO and Music Director Rafael Payare — certainly didn’t escape notice.
The hall’s capacity has been reduced from 2,248 seats to about 1,700 in the main auditorium. Instead of a makeshift portable orchestra shell, a permanent metal mesh shell has been erected on three sides of the stage. With the removal of the valance that covered the top third of the proscenium arch, the ceiling over the orchestra is noticeably higher than before, clad with 20 new adjustable fiberglass reflecting panels. The stage floor has been resurfaced with (presumably more sonically responsive) cream-colored wood, and the rear of the stage now has permanent semicircular risers for the orchestra. The edge of the stage apron appears to be jutting a bit further out into the hall, which also has acoustical advantages.
There are new, more comfortable green-padded seats, with exposed wood around the edges (as is the current fashion), which should enhance the hall’s resonance. The lighting in the auditorium is brighter than before, though still a bit dim compared to other halls. Most noticeable of all, there’s at last a choral terrace surrounding three sides of the stage — which, when not in use, can seat extra patrons, raising the potential capacity to 1,823. Otherwise, the ornate 95-year-old architecture remains pretty much intact, with its fan-shaped lower level and semi-shoebox structure upstairs.
I’ve heard Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with San Diego’s now-retired principal guest conductor, Edo de Waart, and Mahler Fifth’s with Payare, but the Second is a more grandiose, all-encompassing creature. It has the advantage of including a pair of vocal soloists and a chorus, plus a pipe organ (completely hidden from the audience in Jacobs Music Center except when heard through partially opened vertical louvers in the walls) — allowing one to run the gamut of possibilities in the hall, like testing a new home music system.
Following opening night on Sept. 28 and a first performance of Mahler’s Second on Oct. 4, the concert I attended, on Saturday, Oct. 5, was only the third that the SDSO has given in this space.
First of all, Jacobs Music Center offers considerably livelier acoustics post-renovation. Simply from the evidence of SDSO Artistic Consultant Gerard McBurney’s preconcert lecture, I noticed a longer reverberation time in the hall, yet I could still understand McBurney’s every word.
The overall sound from where I was sitting (a right-of-center seat in Row A upstairs) was louder and in general clearer, particularly during the opening work of Saturday’s program, Thomas Larcher’s Time: Three Movements for Orchestra. This 2022 work is a collection of spectacular percussion effects, crunching crescendos, mysterious meanderings, and attempts at songful passages.
Whereas pre-renovation, some of the sound seemed trapped, it now fills the hall, and one can hear an adequate amount of sound reflected from the rear. As a general rule, the more sound you can hear from the rear, the better the hall is. It’s also a very quiet room as far as ambient noise is concerned; you could have heard a pin drop during the softest portions of the performance.
However, Mahler’s Second exposed some flaws, although some may not be the hall’s. The mighty opening passage in the basses and cellos emerged somewhat blurred, blunting some of its force, and the clarity of detail you could hear in Larcher’s work was somewhat buried in Mahler’s. The strokes of the timpani and bass drum landed with a boomy thud, missing the pinging definition of, say, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Mezzo-soprano Anna Larsson was the soloist in the “Urlicht” (Primal light) movement, yet she sounded recessed within the orchestra. (I remember the same thing happening when soprano Joélle Harvey was singing with de Waart in the old hall.) Larsson and soprano Angela Meade were placed next to the harps in the fifth movement, and there wasn’t much projection from there either.
Yet the new choral terrace and the brand-new San Diego Symphony Festival Chorus, in its debut, scored complete successes. The sound of the chorus’s entrance in the fifth movement was cool, deep, and richly blended, reinforced by the lower strings. Andrew Megill, who has been a fixture at the Carmel Bach Festival, is the choral director, and we can expect good things to come, although there are no other scheduled appearances for the chorus in the SDSO’s 2024–2025 season.
For his part, Payare was clearly reveling in the moment. All along, he wanted a hall in which he could credibly conduct a big Mahler symphony, and he writhed and swung his baton wildly to whip up as fervent a performance as he could. Tempos were generally on the fast side, the more reflective passages invested with hearty portamentos in the strings, the climaxes raised to a decibel level that might have blown the roof off a different hall. But the orchestra had enough fuel left in its tank to bring the piece’s final galvanic surge to a mighty head, undergirded by the tremendous rumbling of the organ.
As always with new halls, this is a preliminary report. There has to be time for the orchestra members to get used to the space, to sharpen their abilities to hear each other, to try out all kinds of repertoire, and — in the process — to raise the level of their performances. Payare’s choices in his first season are geared toward his preferences for epic Germanic and Russian material — Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande and Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet are coming up later this month. Payare thinks big, and fortunately he is allied with management that thinks likewise.
