Jewel on the Mississippi

By Michael Walsh

New concert halls in the U.S. have tended to be either lavishly restored movie $ palaces, such as Powell Hall in St. Louis and the Paramount Theater in Oakland, or gleaming, high-tech edifices like Davies Hall in San Francisco and Meyerhoff Hall in Baltimore. Last week in St. Paul, Architect Benjamin Thompson, the designer of Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, unveiled a stunning combination: the Ordway Music Theater, a $45 million jewel overlooking the Mississippi that is one of the handsomest public spaces for music in America.

Opening with the American premiere of Swedish Composer Lars Johan Werle's opera Animalen, among other events, the multipurpose hall is the new home of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Opera and the Schubert Club, a local recital sponsor. In appearance, it recalls a Victorian men's club, with a generous use of mahogany and brass, both in the spacious lobbies and within its two auditoriums. The seats--between 1,815 and 2,000 in the larger, depending on the configuration of the stage--are a warm shade called terra cotta, and a blue patterned carpet covers most of the floors. Given the prevailing climate in Minnesota during the concert season, the cozy warmth conveyed by the materials is not misplaced.

If the Ordway evokes an earlier era visually, acoustically it is right up to date. Like its counterparts in Baltimore and San Francisco, it is "tunable." Unlike them, though, the hall's adjustable panels, which can alter the reverberation time from 1.4 to 2.2 sec., are not hung awkwardly in public view, but instead are hidden in the ceiling and recessed behind slats in the walls. New halls usually take some time before they sort themselves out acoustically: at first hearing it appears that the Ordway's sound, designed by Acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard of Chicago, is rich and clear, and not plagued by the spottiness and dullness that first afflicted Davies Hall and continues to mar the contemporaneous Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto.

Animalen, however, was not the best choice to inaugurate the Ordway operatically, even though it reflects both the region's Scandinavian ethnic background and the Minnesota Opera's long-standing commitment to new works. More a politically pacifist, musically jejune cabaret than an opera, it concerns a convention of animals that are worried about the nuclear arms race. They lecture representatives from the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the importance of avoiding war, and later turn up at a peace conference in Vienna. There a romance between a Las Vegas-type American entertainer and a Soviet chanteuse ends in a mass wedding and the message that all we need is love.

Even if these worthy but obvious sentiments had been set with the wit of a Brecht or the irony of a Weill, the piece would still be weak. But Librettist Tage Danielsson is no Brecht, and Werle shares with Weill only three letters of their surnames. In an opera as dependent as this on sure- handed pastiche, Werle's parodies of American lounge acts and soulful Russian folk songs consistently fall flat. Surely, the company that premiered Conrad Susa's magical chamber opera Transformations in 1973 and has championed resident Composer Dominick Argento could have chosen a better piece for this occasion. Perhaps Argento's Casanova's Homecoming, scheduled for April, will prove to be such a work. A performing space like the Ordway deserves it.