Sonic boom

"We're here for you," NEC president Laurence Lesser told the glittering black-tie-and-evening-gown audience. The hall itself is a sight for sore eyes, refurbished back to the way it looked when it first opened on October 20, 1903. The murky brown ceiling panels are now off-white, lending a warm and spacious creaminess that's highlighted by the dazzling restored giltwork interwoven with the newly discovered jade of the proscenium. The marbled glass panes on the ceiling have been lovingly repaired. The ugly valance over the stage has been removed and new and more flexible lighting has been installed (one selection even had an accompanying light show). The new seats are not quite so tilted in the side sections, and the springs - as Lesser has been quoted - no longer rise up to greet you. An elegant street-level elevator affords easy access for the handicapped. A crucial water fountain has vanished, but there's a roomier ladies' room (so I'm told) and a new men's room on orchestra level. Even more important, the hall is now silently temperature- controlled, which makes this a major new venue for concerts in the summer months.

If anyone will want to hear them. What, I keep asking myself, could the restorers have done to create such a cold, harsh, clear but overly brilliant sound? What happened to the hall's legendary warmth and depth? Could cleaning off the dirt, supplying a new coat of paint, or adding a few handrailings make such a difference? Everything, we've been told, had been done with the utmost care, down to replacing woodwork with the exact same kind of wood.

But something has gone terribly wrong. The shrill opening notes of the trumpet sextet playing Daniel Pinkham's new Fanfare for the Reawakening of Jordan Hall could have reawakened the dead spirits of the hall's great past performers (were the students merely playing too loud?). The second piece - Christopher Rouse's Bonham, a tribute to the Led Zeppelin drummer - was delivered with great panache by the NEC Percussion Ensemble, but at rock-concert decibels. Then, from the balcony, the NEC Brass Ensemble blasted out two Gabrieli canzoni that were ear-piercing even from my seat under the balcony. I thought you were supposed to test acoustics by how well you could hear the softest playing, not the loudest. What on earth did Lesser have in mind by assembling such a deafening program?

Our host for the evening, quarter-of-a-million-dollar benefactor Francis W. Hatch, reiterated that no face lift was as important as preserving the acoustics. He even recited a poem he had written for the occasion about the "queen" of concert halls and her new tiara, complete with alliterative acoustical memories of the "lingering luminescent afterglow." Yet he lingered mostly on the hall's new attributes. He called the new wheelchair access "mighty important these days." (Did it used to be less important before getting grants depended on it?)

The piece that could finally tell us what we wanted to know about the acoustics was a movement from a Boccherini Quintet, with Yo-Yo Ma joining the NEC Prep School's Amaryllis String Quartet. The summer before last, at the opening of Tanglewood's new Seiji Ozawa Hall (acoustically supervised by the same company called in for Jordan Hall), there was so little bass it was hard to hear Ma's cello in the John Williams Cello Concerto. One could certainly make out his unmistakable voice in a teasing little cello solo in the Boccherini, but it seemed uncommonly thin and dry, and the other strings sounded even thinner. Where was that "luminescent afterglow"?

Another star, Wynton Marsalis, played with a student jazz ensemble in a couple of riveting Thelonious Monk pieces. Marsalis, amplified, was the only performer all evening who actually modulated his instrument to give it a softer edge.

What about the singing voice? The guinea pig was 1988 NEC graduate Denyce Graves, who is now doing Carmen at the Met. She sang an aria for another sexpot, Dalila (Saint-Saëns's luscious "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix"), but in a style so chaste and uninflected, she might have been singing "Ave Maria." And though it was clear what voluptuous tones she has, they seemed to exist without air around them, the acoustics brightening the higher frequencies rather than reinforcing the lower ones.

She got no help from conductor Richard Hoenich and the relatively unformed NEC Symphony Orchestra. The woodwinds had presence, but the unforgiving acoustics underlined every flaw in the ensemble - even more so in the closing piece, Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. The soloist, international-prize-winning NEC undergraduate pianist Jong-Hwa Park, a student of Russell Sherman's, played brilliantly (oh, those octaves!), with a sparkling combination - especially in the long opening solo - of playfulness and grandeur. But with a chorus forcing the piano almost to the flowery lip of the stage, one never heard a pianissimo (were there any all evening?). The chorus was too loud, and the violins sounded as if they'd just met (which is probably not far from the truth).

A distinguished singer sitting near me kept her fingers in her ears during the cacophonous applause. The sound in the house, once pleasantly dampered, is now as "hot" as the sound coming from the stage. But she also commented that at least a hall that's too "live" is easier to fix than one with the opposite problem. Maybe that ugly valance at the proscenium really contributed to the hall's warmth and depth (though it wasn't there in 1903). Maybe a century of dirt added to the sonic bloom. Maybe the acousticians weren't getting everything they asked for. And maybe a few weeks or months of shakedown will do the trick (as it had this summer at Ozawa Hall). But imagine getting ready to settle into a warm bath and discovering that the tub has been filled with ice, or going to the Gardner Museum expecting to find a Vermeer.

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Next night, Benjamin Zander led a better orchestra, the NEC's teenage Youth Symphony, in a free concert, the climax of which was the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, with Korean-born HaeSun Paik (another prizewinning student of Russell Sherman's). It put the recent BSO performance (Evgeny Kissin under Seiji Ozawa) to utter shame. Paik is a power player who never pounds, effortlessly producing volumes that visibly cost Kissin considerable exertion. But she can also impress you with both her speed and her delicacy. With Zander shaping the orchestra around her, she created an atmosphere, a drama of inner turmoil, rhapsodic ecstasy, and idyllic contemplation. Then after flooring us with the Tchaikovsky, she returned with an exquisite Liszt Petrarch Sonnet as an encore. (NEC has just released a CD of the concerto with these same forces made on tour in Buenos Aires.)

The evening began with a tight, dramatic Coriolan Overture (performed, along with the Tchaikovsky, by last year's players) and (with this year's players) the Boston premiere of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony (1930), a quirkily loose-limbed, bluesy, jazzy piece (the animated fast movement quotes Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," written that same year) delivered with mellowed-out abandon. Still's centenary was a good excuse to have this enter the repertoire.

The acoustics, of course, hadn't begun to be reconsidered yet, but at least representatives of NEC were acknowledging the problems. With the better orchestra, it was both clearer and more puzzling what these problems are. The sound not only blares, it's also quite uneven. Solo voices suddenly stick out. Whole sections (for example cellos and basses) can be loud one minute and disappear the next. It also didn't matter quite as much. But even if the problems are corrected, is the old Jordan Hall now only a memory?

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Two weeks earlier, at Sanders Theatre (because Jordan Hall wasn't ready yet), Zander opened his Boston Philharmonic season with one of their strongest concerts. The program was atypical for a heavy Austro-German specialist like Zander yet thoroughly exhilarating: three 20th-century dance pieces - American, French, and Russian - based on popular idioms.

John Harbison's Remembering Gatsby is a witty yet terrifying foxtrot - the only music he's made public from his forthcoming opera based on The Great Gatsby, which the Metropolitan Opera will produce before the end of the millennium (not so far away). It's party-music-with-cataclysm, a dance tune for the end of a world (like Ravel's La valse), in this case both the 1920s and the entire 20th century.

Then the increasingly stupendous Stephen Drury played Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, which also owes Gershwin bigtime. It's not possible anyone has played the solo part more flawlessly or with more beautiful tone. The harder the technical challenges, the more subtle the colorations Drury creates. You can hear each note, no matter how many of them are coming at you per second, yet the sense of continuity leaves you gasping. There was a mutual support system with the orchestra, and Zander let me hear things I've never noticed before (like the gossamer yet sensual harp solo, played by wonderful Martha Moor).

Drury returned for the bravura piano part in Stravinsky's Petrushka, which Zander and the orchestra performed with equal bravura. Zander's idea, and I had my doubts, was to run surtitles explaining the story of the ballet. They were distracting at first, but it soon became clear that the players were responding quite precisely to Stravinsky's every hint. They obviously knew what each phrase signified, which made for an unusually complex and consistently surprising sense of detail. I've seen performances of the ballet in which the dancers themselves weren't nearly as funny - or moving - as Zander's remarkable musicians.