First Look & Listen At Dallas’ New Winspear Opera House

We’ve been fortunate to attend two grand openings during our time here in Dallas, once in 1989 and again today . I don’t mean gallery openings or restaurant openings; I mean the kind of opening that happens about once every 50 years for a type of venue.

In 1989 we attended the gala opening of the Morten H. Meyerson Symphony Center (aka “The Mort” for obvious reasons), a stunning design by the famous architect I.M. Pei, and the only concert hall he ever did. Twenty years later on Sunday afternoon, almost to the month, we attended the Spotlight Concert for the Margot & Ted Winspear Opera House right next door.

Everyone associated with the Opera, whether they’re attendees or performers, has been looking forward to this event for quite some time. The Dallas Opera has been performing in the Fair Park Music Hall almost since its inception. The Music Hall is cavernous (3420 seats), dark, cramped backstage, and very difficult to hear if you aren’t in orchestra or first balcony seats. I’ve spent many hours backstage in those dingy dressing rooms, so I personally can’t wait to see how the Winspear improves on them.

In contrast, the Winspear is very sleek and modern from the outside, with a large moveable louver “roof” to shade it from the Texas sun, and glass windows that are supposed to slide up and down as weather permits. It’s almost a third smaller than the Music Hall, seating 2200 people. The structure surrounding the Margaret McDermott concert hall is covered in a hard red plastic, with red neon lights inside it to display entrance names, floor levels, and even the opera house’s name. There are cantilevered stairs with exposed steps and glass-plus-chrome railings all the way up to the fifth level; it’s actually not for someone that has a fear of heights. The concert hall inside has sort of a mid-century Modern look with a bit of a Scandinavian twist. Its most prominent feature, I think, are the sculpted metal bands that ring the concert hall and (I presume) diffuse the direct sound from the stage. It has mahogany floors that may be good for acoustics, but is very distracting when they meet a latecomer during the concert wearing heels. Tap, tap, tap…does anyone ever think of taking their shoes off? It’s a thrill to walk into a distinctive concert hall like the Winspear, or the Mort, or the Disney in Los Angeles, for the very first time. I never get tired of showing visitors around the Meyerson. And there’s an extra thrill when you know you’re among the first to see the hall, period.

The Spotlight concert was a free but only word-of-mouth advertised event, held partly to thank Texas Instruments and Margaret McDermott, widow of one of TI’s founders, for their sponsorship. We got in “legally”, but hey, I’m a fifteen year TI alumnus so I didn’t feel out of place.

The main reason for the concert, however, was to test the sound of the hall for the first time. To do this, you must have bodies in seats as any concert hall sounds very different with our sound-absorbing and scattering bodies than it sounds empty. This was made immediately evident as Bob Essert of Sound Space Design of London, the chief acoustician of the hall’s design, set up an unusual speaker on stage. Instructing us to be quiet while he held up his hand, he ran a series of frequency sweeps and bursts of white noise to document the hall’s frequency response and latency with our warm bodies in it. With that completed, the concert began with Opera Music Director Graeme Jenkins leading the Opera Orchestra, chorus, and soloists.

Maestro Jenkins had selected a range of pieces, from very intimate piano and violin chamber music to the huge finale of Die Meistersinger with chorus, organ, onstage brass and percussion, and the 85-piece orchestra. I’m guessing he selected the wide range to check out how the hall sounded in different situations. Unfortunately, the audience was apparently shy of seasoned concertgoers. I suspect many of them, with little kids in tow, were there more to see the hall than sit through a somewhat lengthy concert. Children were more in evidence than usual on this Sunday afternoon, and for a particularly quiet chamber piece the Maestro turned around and asked if the children that couldn't keep quiet be kept outside for the duration of the piece. Seems a bit harsh at first, but when you consider that the main purpose of the concert was to hear and tune the hall – not the audience – a little cooperation would have been nice. The little girl and her parents behind us did NOT leave, so we were treated to 10 minutes of torture as we alternated between trying to focus on the piano / violin piece and hearing the girl just behind us. Unless we had the distraction of ANOTHER woman clicking into the hall on her heels. <sigh>

The sound of the hall was instantly, clearly different than the Meyerson. Very crisp, very dry. I’m not an expert at describing such things, but it was also the general consensus of other concertgoers we talked to. I guess this would translate to a more dominant high frequency response than the Mort, but the sound doesn’t ‘hang’, or echo about the place. It’s much less resonant than the Mort. There’s a surprising amount of detail you can hear from the orchestra – and remember, they’re in the pit in front of and under the stage. You can hear practically every note, good or bad.

There’s work to be done acoustically and physically, of course. I thought there was a little TOO much volume out of the pit, which overbalanced the soloists. Odd sound reflections, causing us to wonder if there was an offstage band or not. Separating of woodwinds and brass across the pit from each other, which created a disjointed sound. And several people crashed to the floor that afternoon; one tripped over a taped-down microphone cable, another stepped off an unmarked 4-inch riser in rear orchestra. And I really hope they just haven’t installed the hydraulic closers on the inner concert hall doors yet; the sound of a door thudding shut should not be heard in a $354 million dollar performance hall.

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