New York: 'What a sound': Superb sound at Carnegie Hall thrills CSO's fans -- and musicians

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(Free-Press-Release.com) December 11, 2006 -- A New York audience -- including many international visitors -- gets to hear just how fine the CSO is and the CSO gets to be heard -- and its players get to hear themselves -- in one of the greatest acoustical venues in the world.
In fact, after Friday night's performance of Mahler's Seventh Symphony, whether overhearing audience members departing their seats or orchestra musicians backstage or talking with conductor Pierre Boulez in his dressing room, the refrain was the same: "What a sound."

Chicago's Orchestra Hall is much beloved -- and rightly so -- for its location smack-dab in the middle of Michigan Avenue and across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago, and for the physical intimacy that its largely vertical seating layout creates between the audience and the stage. But this very shape and structure has long limited the full sound available not only to the seats in the auditorium but to the players performing and to the conductor leading them.

Large empty spaces at home
The lavish expansion of the building into Symphony Center created needed new administrative offices and a more spacious backstage facilities. But it also brought with it many large empty spaces and, most disappointingly, an acoustical renovation that at best kept the hall's limitations of sound and at worst actually diminished the resonance, especially in the upper strings and within the orchestra onstage.

Carnegie, on the other hand, is a 100-plus-year-old marvel of acoustical alchemy -- famously damaged at least once in the 20th century but in recent decades restored to glory. For Boulez the acoustics are "generous"; for a younger concertgoer "it sounds like stereo." For me, coming from Orchestra Hall to Carnegie Hall always evokes the shift from black-and-white to color in "The Wizard of Oz." The sound is rich, the various soloists and components of the orchestra blend properly with each other and the players' happiness with the space is palpable.

That these elements all come together is especially important for today's CSO. For as this first tour of the post-Daniel Barenboim era makes clear, the orchestra that Barenboim reshaped over the last 17 years now presents not only string, wind and brass sections of the highest level but three sections that are matched almost seamlessly and that match each other with their ears and playing.

Source: http://www.yahoo.com