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First Listen at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL CON BLASTO blog
Soon everyone interested in Atlanta’s perfoming-arts scene will have an opinion about the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, a multi-purpose “road house” theater set to open Sept 15.
Subscribers and donors of the Atlanta Opera, about 1,000 people, got their first taste Tuesday night at a “listening event,” where Walter Huff’s opera chorus, pianist Craig Kier and a quintet of singers offered arias and excerpts from the opera’s 2007-08 season. Bob Edge, an Atlanta attorney and opera board member, served as affable host.
Yoel Levi, the former Atlanta Symphony music director, was in the audience. He’ll make his Atlanta Opera debut in November, conducting “Hansel and Gretel.”
While it’s still too early to pronounce judgement, how did it sound? Larry Kirkegaard, whose Kirkegaard Associates firm, based in Chicago, designed the auditorium’s acoustics, admits he was disappointed Tuesday night. “The sound was not getting out of the stage as well as we would have hoped,” he said during a lunch at the center Wednesday.
To fix the problem, Kirkegaard and his senior consultant Anthony Shou rolled up their sleeves and began building a “shell” to improve the sound for tonight’s invitation-only performance, the opera’s second and final listening event with singers and full orchestra. (A stage shell is a curved, portable wall that’s positioned behind the performers and designed to bounce sound back out to the audience.)
“We’re very hands-on,” Shou said, after a trip to the nearest Home Depot and an art store. The two purchased every framed painter’s canvas they could find and plan to construct a shell with them, with rolls of painter’s canvas to go overhead.
Heavy fabrics provide gentle reflection of higher tones, from middle C on up, explained Kirkegaard. And that’s what some listeners felt was missing from Tuesday’s event. The fabric shell helps make up for the fact that there was no scenery onstage to reflect the singers and orchestra, Kirkegaard said.
For budgetary reasons, the Cobb Energy center did not include an orchestral shell in its stage equipment — which means that if groups like the Cobb Symphony Orchestra or Atlanta Symphony wanted to perform there, they’d need to construct their own.
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