At new Ordway hall, the SPCO has a home of its own

When the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra plays its debut concert Thursday in the Ordway Concert Hall, it will begin a new era.

Gone are the days when the orchestra competed for a performance space at the Ordway with other arts institutions. The new hall is specifically designed for acoustic music — and the SPCO in particular.

With its dramatic wave-like ceiling sweeping down to the stage, and pristine white walls covered with acoustically-friendly abstract shapes, the concert hall puts the orchestra in a striking setting. But concert-goers will notice its true magical quality when the SPCO begins to play.

Principal second violin Kyu-Young Kim said the carefully created acoustics of the 1,100-seat hall allow a musical subtlety.

"It's so intimate, it changes the way we play because we can play so much softer in here," he said. "And it's not about projecting, but drawing the audience in."

The pieces for the opening concerts on Thursday and Friday include Beethoven's "Eroica Symphony." Both concerts are sold out. Thursday's performance will be broadcast live on Minnesota Public Radio's classical music stations beginning at 7.30 p.m.

As is now common practice at the SPCO, the entire evening will be led by musicians. There is no conductor.

The SPCO has been rehearsing in the hall since early January. Principal flute Julia Bogorad-Kogan likens the experience to gaining a familiarity with a new instrument.

"You have to learn how to play it, you have to learn how it responds, how you want to make an attack, what you need to do to draw the sound out," she said. "The same thing is true in a new hall. We actually have to learn how to play in it."

The musicians have been working with an acoustician who uses curtains and other acoustic treatments to adjust the hall and how their playing sounds in the new space.

Bogorad-Kogan said the first time she stood in the balcony and heard the sound from the audience's perspective she was blown away.

"The sound just envelops you," she said. "It's warm, it's rich, it's inviting and it's really what we had hoped for."

The new concert hall solves what has been a 30-year challenge for the Ordway: to efficiently and profitably schedule the building's tenants. When the venue opened in 1985, they quickly learned that the Ordway was not as flexible as originally envisioned.

"So for the first year in the Ordway, which was programmed to have something different in there every day, it was a complete logistical and financial disaster," Minnesota Orchestra President and CEO Kevin Smith said.

Smith worked for decades at the Minnesota Opera. He participated in the struggles as the Opera, the SPCO, the Schubert Club, the Ordway itself, and early on the Minnesota Orchestra tried to find satisfactory ways to share the Ordway main stage. At times, their battles were contentious.

The Minnesota Orchestra stopped regularly performing at the Ordway in 2005. The SPCO threatened to leave. After years of watching various approaches to sharing the stage fail, Smith suggested what others said was a crazy idea — replacing the underused 300-seat McKnight Theater with a new concert hall for the SPCO.

At first, Smith recalled, the proposal left people gasping. Then they agreed.

An $80 million capital campaign launched in 2008 raised $42 million for the hall and created an endowment. The effort survived both the economic downturn and an SPCO contract dispute that led the orchestra to lock out the musicians for 191 days.

Construction started in June 2013 and finished in January. But workers are still adding finishing touches.

Now the hall is ready to go, much to the delight of SPCO President Bruce Coppock.

"This is a transformational moment for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra," he said.

Coppock said the acoustics of the new hall are so good he expects the SPCO will become a better orchestra. He predicts the musicians will develop a tighter, more cohesive sound, both at the hall and elsewhere. He also believes the hall will draw guest musicians from all over the world.

The SPCO's rendition of "Beethoven's Eroica," Coppock said, is just a taste of things to come.

"For the SPCO to play that piece unconducted, is a significant artistic accomplishment. It's ever so slightly audacious," he said. "But that's why we are here — to do audacious things."