Hey, Roy Thomson Hall actually sounds good

by Robert Everett-Green / The Globe and Mail (September 23, 2002)

It's not every day that 2,600 people feel the urge to dress up, run downtown and listen to a building. But that was the order of the night on Saturday, as Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall showed off its new sound with a gala concert by the hall's principal tenants, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Mendelssohn Choir.

RTH spent $20-million and was closed for 22 weeks while surgeons from Artec Consultants tried to cure the hall's acoustical ills. Their prescription, realized by KPMB Architects and the construction firm Ellis Don, was to shrink the interior volume by bulking up the auditorium walls, and to install a pair of sound-reflective canopies over and in front of the stage.

The goal was to give the music more impact and resonance, and to warm up the look of the concrete interior with the addition of 1,100 square metres of white Canadian maple. When the King of Babylon sang his praise to the God of Wood, during Saturday's performance of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, he was right in tune with the project.

The God of Music had to be pleased as well. The "new" hall is certainly a more lively room for music than the old. There's a deeper pool of resonance in the bass, and a more vibrant tone up top. The sound hangs in the air a bit longer, instead of fleeing before it can be properly savoured.

The TSO's double basses have never sounded so gutsy as they did from my seat in the mezzanine on Saturday. During the opening section of Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2, Ravel's beautifully modulated sunrise seemed to fill the whole horizon from bottom to top, as it never did in the old hall.

Everyone in the wind section seemed to be playing a slightly better instrument than before, with a more idiomatic sound. There was more fibre in the woodwinds, and a brighter glow in the brass. The final trumpet flourishes in the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg were the first really thrilling sound in the show. The most surprising was the resonant thrumming of Judy Loman's harp, which in Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy sounded more like two harps than one.

What the room still lacks, and may never achieve, is that immersive, "wow" quality you get in a truly first-class hall. The fairy-tale scenario, in which Artec's Russell Johnson would wave his wand and turn RTH into Carnegie Hall, has not come to pass, through no fault of the acoustician.

In a great hall, a good performance of Daphnis should leave you slightly drunk. RTH did a much better job of diffusing the sexy perfumes of this music than it used to, but at the end of the piece sobriety reigned much as before.

To my ears, that was the most telling piece on Sir Andrew Davis's program, which was otherwise crowded with big rambunctious works for the largest possible number of performers, including the Toronto Children's Chorus, which streamed into the new main-floor aisles for heavily upholstered arrangements of O Canada and God Save the Queen. But the sternest test of a concert hall is not what happens when the music gets unusually fat, but when it slims down to something that has to retain its intimacy right to the back of the hall.

It also seemed odd to try to make a case for the hall's newfound excellence by playing third-rate pieces like the Walton and the Sarasate. Violinist James Ehnes gave a brilliant if rather chaste performance of the Fantasy, and showed off the higher presence possible for a solo instrument under the new dispensation. The Walton, with bass-baritone soloist Nathan Berg, abounded in loud orchestral chords, but it mostly proved that it's just as easy to overplay at RTH now as before.

The soprano aria, Dich, teure Halle, from Wagner's Tannhauser, provided another kind of revelation, when Measha Bruggergosman let fly with her astoundingly rich and powerful voice. Forget about the hall: This young Canadian is headed for great things, and star billing at the world's Wagner temples.

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir seemed to gain least from the acoustical modifications, though the choir could choose, for its own shows, to move the rear canopy into a more flattering position. Both canopies have been shifting up and down this week, as Artec and the musicians try to find the best positions for these and the other components of the hall.

Another adjustment will happen on its own, after the TSO begins its regular season on Wednesday. TSO concerts have been averaging something like 68 per cent attendance, and even with the lure of the hall renovation, it's unlikely to start selling out every night. Saturday's show was packed, both in the auditorium and on the stage, and all those bodies absorbed sound. Under more normal conditions, the hall should sound even better than during its second debut.