In San Diego, an orchestra comes out to play
SAN DIEGO, CALIF.—Yes, San Diego is an outdoors city, blessed with an enviable oceanside location and a climate worthy of a snowbird’s dreams. No wonder the local symphony orchestra wants to come out and play.
It has an even better reason now, thanks to last month’s opening of Rady Shell in Jacobs Park, a downtown al fresco setting for up to 10,000 people, picturesquely surrounded on three sides by water.
The setting is nature’s gift, slightly reminiscent of the days when the Toronto Symphony Orchestra had a popular series at Ontario Place. And I say slightly because Ontario Place offered the orchestra a shared residence in a multi-purpose facility, whereas Rady Shell was developed specifically as a home for the San Diego Symphony.
Described as the only permanent waterfront performance space on the West Coast, the handsome shell stretches forward as if to embrace the audience, with a series of speakers lined up on each side of the upward sweeping, (imitation) grass-covered audience area.
At an afternoon rehearsal, I took the opportunity to walk around and sample the sound from different standpoints and was not surprised to find the best sound — which was surprisingly good — closer to the front, where most of it came directly from the stage.
At the orchestra’s opening concert I was even more impressed. Many years ago, after attending a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert at Meadowbrook, I wrote that it was the only orchestra in my experience that sounded better in its outdoor summer home than in its (then) indoor winter home, bone-dry Ford Auditorium.
I haven’t heard a concert in San Diego’s Copley Symphony Hall, a converted vintage movie house, but the enthusiasm I heard expressed about the new address suggests that it represents a welcome arrival.
Toronto isn’t San Diego and neither is Detroit but, in cities across the continent, the arrival of COVID-19 has led orchestras to seek ways to enhance their outdoor profiles.
The Montreal Symphony Orchestra has taken to its city’s parks. The Boston Symphony Orchestra heads for Western Massachusetts and Tanglewood. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has Hollywood Bowl.
Though never an ideal solution, Ontario Place gave the Toronto Symphony an opportunity to broaden its audience and lengthen its season.
Rady Shell demonstrates what more can be achieved through years of careful planning. A community effort, because it is part of a park — 85 per cent open to the public — people have routine access to the site.
According to CEO Martha Gilmer, the orchestra plans to present about 110 events there per year, including the first part of its fall season, thanks to San Diego’s friendly climate.
An orchestra with a $30million (U.S.) budget and a 42-week season, the 82-member San Diego Symphony is a finer orchestra than I had expected, but then I didn’t realize that San Diego was America’s eighth largest city either.
The southwest is clearly America’s fastest-growing area; witness the fact that Phoenix, Ariz., recently passed Philadelphia to become the country’s fifth-largest city. A can-do attitude helps explain how the new facility was built almost entirely without government support.
The architects clearly wanted to design a people place, even providing a 12-foot-wide walkaround with benches just outside the porous perimeter fence for those who would like to hear, if not actually see the concert, without buying tickets. During the opening concert I even saw passing sailboats pause to share the experience.
Of course I am describing a special place, not the kind of home most orchestras could hope to build in their neighbourhood. But the need is the same, to reach out to more people in a friendly environment.
The San Diego Symphony has obviously understood this: the opening event at Rady Shell was a full-scale symphony concert, conducted by its popular music director, Rafael Payare, who will add the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to his schedule in 2022, but the second event was a Broadway program presided over by a different maestro, and the third was a concert by Gladys Knight.
Three substantially different audiences attended these concerts, testimony to the orchestra’s wish to open its doors wide. It is a strategy for survival for symphony orchestras in Canada as well as the United States.
In the program handed out for the opening concerts, Payare declared unequivocally: “From the moment I first stood on the stage of what would become Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, I knew that it was going to be an incredibly powerful acoustic for the orchestra.” An important step toward the orchestra’s future had just been taken.