Max's Music Box shines on first test:
Acoustics in hall good — but not quite perfect

BY MARK STRYKER
FREE PRESS MUSIC CRITIC

Saturday's gala celebration and concert may have been the official coming-out party for the $60 million Max M. Fisher Music Center, but Wednesday was the first night that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra really took the building out for a spin to see what it could do. It was an impressive performance.

With a diverse chamber music concert inaugurating the Music Box and a double bill of Oscar Peterson and Branford Marsalis opening the jazz series at Orchestra Hall, the Max roared with life. Two distinct audiences, lured to the Max by the promise of different rewards, mingled in the expansive atrium lobby. The music symbolized a refreshing ideology of inclusion.

The Beaux Arts Trio played Beethoven's "Archduke Trio." Eighth Blackbird explored the classical music of our time. The DSO Brass Quintet dipped into Bach and Karl Husa. Violinist Daniel Hope revived Ravi Shankar's nascent fusion of Western and Eastern idioms. Peterson's quartet comforted the jazz mainstream; Marsalis' aggressive post-bop quartet tugged at its seams.

The biggest question mark of the evening was the acoustics of the Music Box, the linchpin in the DSO's drive to expand its audiences. Multipurpose halls are notoriously fickle because the reverberation necessary to flatter traditional classical music turns amplified or percussion-heavy music into a muddy mess, and splitting the difference often leaves everybody dissatisfied.

Judging acoustics based on only one night in the hall is a bit like tasting Bordeaux from the barrel, but with that caveat in mind, the sound-bite summary is this: The hall is not perfect, but the acoustics Wednesday were promising enough that it's safe to call the Music Box the best hall for chamber music in metro Detroit.

Now some details: The Music Box, designed by the Connecticut firm of Jaffe Holden Acoustics, allows for multiple setups. It can seat 450 for a traditional recital, but Wednesday's arrangement allowed for about 300, with only one row of seats on the floor in front of the 12 rows on risers. Except for Hope's Shankar tribute, all of the ensembles performed on the wood floor near the center of the room. Hope, Gaurav Mazumdar (sitar) and Sai Shyam Mohan (tabla) sat on a small modular stage tucked to the rear of the shoebox.

Motorized curtains along the top of the side walls allow the hall to be tuned for specific styles. For the brass quintet and Beaux Arts Trio, the curtains were tucked in their shell; they emerged for Eighth Blackbird, a mixed wind, string and percussion sextet. For Hope and company, the curtains were almost fully deployed.

Overall, the sound is extremely live. In Husa's Divertimento for Brass Quintet, the opening fanfare emerged in broadly resonant waves of warmth. Yet the sound didn't lose its focus until the strands of counterpoint in the excerpt from Bach's "Art of the Fugue" began to dissolve more than I would have liked. Even with curtains to dry out the sound, I'm not sure how well the hall will handle a drum set in a jazz band.

Eighth Blackbird came off the best, acoustically and artistically. The pianissimo whispers of flute, violin and clarinet and the sinewy modern textures in David Schober's imaginative "Variations" spoke with bracing clarity and intimacy. The group's casual dress, judicious choreography -- members play from memory and glide slowly into different formations -- lickety-split execution, kinetic energy and some restrained lighting effects heightened to the drama.

The psychology was interesting, too: Eighth Blackbird's repertoire, youth and avant-style merged seamlessly with the vibe of the sleekly modern decor. The acoustic tiles on the wall suggest the interlocking planes of a Cezanne landscape, each with its own recessed light: The Music Box is a stunning space for contemporary music.

The venerable Beaux Arts Trio brought the most mixed sonic impressions. Soft passages in the "Archduke" were lovely, but whenever the music began to swell with fury, volume or passion, the sound of violinist Hope and cellist Antonio Meneses never bloomed with the rapture I expected -- though pianist Menahem Pressler, ageless at 79, did. Only in the terse, almost violent scherzo from Shostakovich's E Minor Trio offered as an encore did the strings cut a swashbuckling path though the air.

Some experimentation is surely needed. Perhaps the trio should have set up closer to the wall rather than the middle of the hall, or the portable towers, which were aligned against the back wall, should have been used to create a cocoon-like acoustic shell. Hope's violin tone had more presence with his "East Meets West" ensemble even though he was seated farther away from the audience.

Yes, it may take time to sort it all out, but the good news, sonically and artistically, is that the DSO already has a head start.