One Handsome Hall

Tiffani Frost of the CityDance Ensemble takes the stage in the new $100 million Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. (Paul Gordon Emerson - For The Washington Post)

"We're counting on the Kennedy Center to be what they are so we can be what we are, and together that's a heck of a complementary partnership, as well as an ironic shift of the paradigm. We're not competitors, we're depending on them."

As beautiful as the Music Center is from the outside, it's even more impressive inside, where the concert hall strives to be as sophisticated and acoustically flawless as the finest halls in Europe. Anybody expecting a classy high school auditorium or community center is in for a shock: It has the opulent warmth, intimacy and acoustic ambience of the great 19th-century concert halls that inspired Rawn and Kirkegaard.

According to Pfanstiehl, the concert hall's layout -- 800 of its 1,976 seats are on the floor, the rest in three balconies and 14 free-hanging boxes -- allows the audience to be very close to the stage and to the performers. The curving balconies echo the lines of the roof and hills, while a high ceiling slopes up from the stage over the audience, enhancing the acoustical quality of the space. It is only 100 feet from the front of the stage to the top balcony.

The interior finishes of the concert hall include walls and floors of maple and birch wood. Pfanstiehl says he's not seen as much wood in other halls, "and it has wonderful acoustic properties, an ability to give warmth to sound." The outer walls are made of foot-thick concrete, and painters layered the interior with a high-performance paint that plugged the pores in the concrete walls, preventing sound absorption. Lighting comes from alabaster art glass fixtures, and the whole place simply glows.

Heavy acoustical curtains hidden behind bronze metal grilling and in the ceiling can be raised or lowered to dampen or enliven the sound. Above the stage, 43 individually controlled acoustical reflector panels can be adjusted to best project sound into the audience or shape what's heard on stage. Acoustical adjustments can be made to accommodate the range of programming -- from a solo recital to full symphony orchestra to amplified music.

The result is a very bright acoustic hall built for orchestra, chamber music, any kind of acoustic music; the sound can travel forever because it's all reflective surface (the only fabric inside is aubergine velour on the seats). If amplification is needed, the curtains come down at the push of a button to deaden the house.

"The combination of that and the acoustical panels allows you to change the character of the house and make it comfortable for amplified as well as acoustic music, and you can do it in the middle of a performance," says Michael L. Mael, vice president of the BSO at Strathmore. "You can take a live house and deaden it, but it's very tough to take a dead house and bring it back to life."

"Strathmore has been wonderfully tuned and designed by Larry Kirkegaard and his colleagues," says BSO assistant conductor Andrew Constantine, who helmed several "tuning" concerts for those who built Strathmore and their families and has conducted concerts in many European and American halls.

"It offers a much more detailed picture for the conductor than many other halls I've been in," says Constantine from a tour stop in England. "Listening on stage is very often the worst place to be for the conductor and the orchestral musician. Many times you get a complaint of one section not being able to hear another, and Strathmore offers the wonderful picture of people being able to hear each other intimately. And we're not drowned by the modern-day tendency of the brass being by design louder than their colleagues in the wind and string section. Here we're able to deal with that problem and create a truer picture of the music we're trying to play, 19th-century symphonies, for instance, that are the mainstay of the orchestral repertoire and are very often heard in a totally different perspective from the one they were intended to be heard in."

At rehearsals, Constantine went into the hall to listen at different levels and was impressed with its intimacy. "You could hear absolutely everything at the top of the hall with the same sort of coloration and detail as down at the bottom of the hall," he reports. "You could even hear what the conductor was saying to the orchestra, and I found that incredible."

BSO concertmaster Jonathan Carney says that after several tune-up concerts, orchestra members are "pretty like-minded" in their appraisal: "It's exquisite, absolutely first-class. It has a wonderfully clear, bright sound without being loud, which is difficult, and also a dark, rich, sumptuous sound without being wooly. And the lighting and architectural design lends itself to intimacy and connection between audience and performer, which is half the game right there."

The concert hall has an inviting warmth that's more populist than elitist, and Eliot Pfanstiehl admits "there were certain design criteria we put in there, which was democracy. This building was built with county and state dollars, and $10 million of private money as well, so while there are boxes, this is not anybody's idea of cloistered special-ness." Handicap-accessible seating will be available at every price level and geography in the hall, he adds.

The concert stage also has a sprung floor that will allow it to serve as a dance venue (dance is a significant part of WPAS programming). And folks coming across the bridge over Tuckerman Lane will see the Music Center's large rehearsal spaces through 2 1/2-story-high windows. "You'll see where the art you're about to see came from," Pfanstiehl says.

The educational wing is impressive as well. The Music Center is one of the few professional concert halls with a full music and dance education facility in the same building, with two major rehearsal halls for orchestra and chorus, four classrooms, a 2,500-square-foot dance studio with a sprung floor, and nine practice rooms. Anchored by the Levine School of Music, CityDance Ensemble and Maryland Classic Youth Orchestras, the Education Center will host a full schedule of educational programs, classes and recitals.