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)

In the first season, guest performers and professional musicians will participate in five special master classes and workshops at the Music Center at Strathmore.

Levine School of Music was founded in 1976 in memory of musician and prominent Washington lawyer Selma M. Levine, and offers music instruction and performance opportunities to people of every age, ability and background. "It's a community music school in the truest sense, without the pressure of competing at the conservatory level," says Pfanstiehl. Levine will shift its Maryland site, previously in a church basement in Kensington, to Strathmore, joined by CityDance Ensemble, whose students range in age from 3 to 90 (the latter are dubbed "mature movers"). On Feb. 26, the two groups will offer an informal performance of Prokofiev's children's classic, "Peter and the Wolf," featuring members of CityDance and Levine faculty musicians. The music of Mozart will also be featured, followed by a signing of a new children's book, "Mozart Finds a Melody," by Stephen Costanza.

In December, 10,000 Montgomery County second-graders attended one of the first community previews of the new concert hall (it also served as a tuning test) as the National Philharmonic performed six youth-oriented concerts over three days. Sound wasn't the only thing being fine-tuned. "With the second-graders, we tested the toilets in the building, and they all worked under the most extreme circumstances," Strathmore CEO Pfanstiehl notes wryly.

Also calling Strathmore home now is the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestras (formerly the Montgomery County Youth Orchestra), one of the oldest youth orchestras in the country, founded in 1946. This will be the first time the orchestra, with 450 musicians in grades 4 through 12 has had permanent space for rehearsals and offices.

Pfanstiehl says "many people come to Montgomery County for the school system and for that quality of life, and there are more and more seniors who are staying here longer, for their children and for medical services and quality of life and they want to stay near accessible sites. . . . Now the Education Center will raise these children in the habit of live performing arts. They may not be great artists, but they'll be appreciators because sometime in their early life it was encoded in their DNA that it's okay to do this."

Shelley Brown, Strathmore's director of music programming for the last 18 months, intends to "take what I did [at the Mansion] before the Music Center and grow those values. There are certain things people could count on: that you could take your family, and we hope that people will always feel they can take their kids. That Strathmore presentations have value -- we've tried to price them so people get a good value for their entertainment dollar. We need to be careful about what we ask people to spend on tickets, and while we need to cover the costs and do that responsibly, I hope we can do it in a way that can be as accessible as possible to the widest group of people."

Since 1902, the hills in what is now called North Bethesda ("when I was mayor of Rockville we used to call it South Rockville," County Executive Duncan admits sheepishly) have been dominated by a Georgian-style mansion that was opened in 1983 as Montgomery County's home for the arts, offering small chamber performances and concerts in a 100-seat room, as well as art exhibitions, afternoon tea musicales, lectures and events, and also hosting weddings, and outdoor concerts and film screenings on its front lawn in the summer.

Designated as a Maryland Historic Trust property, the brick building was renovated in 1997 to the tune of $3.2 million, much of it spent on four interconnecting museum-quality galleries on the second floor -- with state-of-the-art lighting, security and humidity control. Those events will continue, though Pfanstiehl says the free outdoor concerts may be fewer in number since Strathmore doesn't want to compete with its own ticketed performances.

However, as far back as 1985, Strathmore's board of directors saw the need for a larger educational and performance space, though it wasn't until the mid-'90s that plans for the Music Center started to solidify with the support of then-Maryland Governor Parris N. Glendening and County Executive Duncan.

"The truth of the matter is this project wouldn't have moved forward if it hadn't hit the state and county legislature in the two years that they had the biggest surpluses that they'll ever have in their lives," Pfanstiehl says. "They had capital gains revenues pouring into the county and the state just before the bubble burst, and that's when we went to them; that's where the major chunk of this money came from, and everybody knew it wouldn't last. When you have big revenues short term, you spend it on capital projects that are one-time gifts because if you do operating programs, you pay for that forever. It's one of the major miracles."

The other was that Metro happened to be building a garage next-door right at the same time. "We got to them just before they put pen to paper, and the garage was designed to attach to this building," Pfanstiehl adds. "Now Metro will be getting revenue streams at hours it would not otherwise, and we got the benefit of not having to build a 1,500-car garage underneath the Music Center."

Located at the Grosvenor-Strathmore Metro station, the six-level garage is connected to the Music Center by a covered bridge named in honor of Carlton R. Sickles, who played a key role in the development of the Metro system. Sickles, a former state delegate and U.S. representative who also served on the Strathmore board of directors, died in January 2004 at age 82.

Perhaps not a miracle, but certainly a fortuitous concordance occurred in 1996, when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, under the leadership of former president John Gidwitz, declared interest in creating a second home in Montgomery County and joined Strathmore as a founding partner. Founded 90 years ago, the BSO has always had a mandate to serve the broader state of Maryland, but beyond that, the BSO's Mael says, "we have a great orchestra, and for us to stay a great orchestra we need to expand into additional markets, and this is obviously a logical place for us to do it."

According to Mael, BSO Music Director Yuri Temirkanov and guest conductors will offer classical and pops concerts not by subtracting from Baltimore but by scheduling more efficiently. The BSO will play at Strathmore on Thursday and in Baltimore Friday and Saturday, or in Baltimore Thursday and Friday and at Strathmore on Saturday (those shows the first season are almost sold out).

Like Pfanstiehl, Mael plays down the Kennedy Center/National Symphony Orchestra competition, "BSO will not succeed by trying to play the NSO in Rockville," says Mael, noting that market surveys found "many people in this area and especially north, where all the growth in the county is going, stopped going down to the Kennedy Center years ago for whatever reason -- too inconvenient, too expensive, too this or that. We're finding that people are not giving up the NSO -- they have an outstanding orchestra already, and now they have a choice."

The Music Center at Strathmore was originally conceived in the late 1990s as a $68 million concert hall (amended in 2000 to cap spending at $89 million for an expanded facility), but after ground was broken in April 2001, the project was plagued by ballooning costs and funding shortfalls. The facility was almost entirely financed with state and county money; last February, the Montgomery County Council approved an additional $3.3 million to help cover $9.6 million in cost overruns. In the end, the State of Maryland and Montgomery County each provided half of the $98.6 million cost of construction. The Strathmore Hall Foundation Inc. raised $7.4 million of an additional $10 million for pre-opening costs and capital expenditures; Strathmore and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra are jointly raising $30 million for an operating endowment.

"We took some heat for this," Duncan concedes, "but we insisted it be done right and top-quality because it's going to be around for generations."

One of the challenges in raising private money for the endowment to help cover operating costs was that many large donors focused charitable giving on arts institutions in Washington, not the suburbs. But founding gifts of $1 million each for operations, endowment and artistic programming have been provided by Comcast, Discovery Communications Inc., The Gazette/The Washington Post/Post Newsweek Tech Media/Philip L. Graham Fund, Lockheed Martin, and the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation.

Looking around Strathmore in the days before its opening, Eliot Pfanstiehl says he "never thought I'd see the cultural renaissance in this county, but if you look around, everybody grew." He notes Round House Theatre's recent $7 million facility in downtown Bethesda, the BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Imagination Stage in Bethesda, the expanded Jewish Community Center in Rockville, the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre in Silver Spring and the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts, which has embarked on a $10.5 million expansion project.

"In a sense they were all born in the same moment, that incredible capital gains boom," Pfanstiehl says. "We're the last ones coming online because of size and scope. In the end what you have is a full-service cultural facility and program that we could only dream of 15 or 20 years ago. In 1985, a planning commission said this is what Montgomery County should someday have, and now it might be better than any of us ever thought would happen."

Richard Harrington is the music writer for Weekend. •