D I S N E Y  C O N C E R T  H A L L

After a delicious brunch at Pete's we waddled up Bunker Hill, past the California Plaza and Museum of Contemporary Art to The Disney Concert Hall to pick up our will-call tickets.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall at 111 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, California is the fourth hall of the Los Angeles Music Center. Bounded by Hope Street, Grand Avenue, 1st and 2nd Streets, it seats 2,265 people and serves (among other purposes) as the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
The Frank Gehry-designed building, an prime example of Deconstructivism, opened in 2003 and features his trademark steel cladding. While the architecture (as with other Gehry works) evoked mixed opinions, the acoustics of the concert hall were widely praised in contrast to its predecessor, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Walt Disney Concert Hall is a synthesis of acoustical and architectural design. The architect, Frank Gehry, and the acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota, from Nagata Acoustics (Tokyo, Japan) came to the design process with very specific goals, but with no preconceptions about the form of the hall. Gehry was interested in a room with a sculpted shape that would be evocative of music and that would create an intimate connection between the orchestra and the audience. Toyota wanted a space that would create a warm sound, but also a sound of exceptional clarity. The Walt Disney family insisted that the hall have an acoustical quality that would equal or surpass the best concert halls in the world.

 The Philharmonic had performed in Suntory Hall, designed by Nagata Acoustics, in Tokyo several times and liked the acoustics and the intimacy created by the location of the concert platform with audience on all sides. This surrounded stage situation is similar to the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. The orchestra decided very early in the process that they wanted this type of hall, rather than the narrower more traditional form (such as Symphony Hall in Boston) which is referred to as a shoebox.

Even the bottoms of the chairs were specifically created to have fabric on the bottom panels rather than metal. Oftentimes at concert halls or movie theaters, the room will sound dramatically different when empty vs. when full. (Take a careful listen to even your car stereo system with several passengers compared to when you are cruising the highway alone.) To allow the performers to practice in front of a simulated “full house,” the fabric-lined bottom panels of the chairs sound almost the same as if concertgoers were sitting in the furniture. Metal is obviously a very reflective surface and practicing in front of an empty hall with 2,000 metal panels bouncing sound back at the performers is going to sound dramatically different when the hall fills up that evening so the Walt Disney Concert Hall smartly does not have any metal surfaces in it.

Designed in collaboration by Frank Gehry and master organ builder Manual J. Rosales, the pipe organ in the Disney Concert Hall was given to the County of Los Angeles as a gift from Toyota Motor Corporation. It features 6,134 pipes that range in size from a small pencil to a telephone pole. This number is just an estimate, as it has proven virtually impossible to count the actual number of pipes that are in the organ. It has taken over 2,000 man hours just to voice and tune this organ, which was built by a group of internationally renowned organ builders, Glatter-Gotz Orgelbau of Germany and Rosales Organ Builders in Los Angeles. Use of fine quality woods is a theme that you find throughout the theater and the pipe organ is no exception. The exterior pipes are made of Douglas fir, while the interior pipes are made of Norwegian pine.
To ensure that the sound of the organ would properly blend with the performers, the wood façade pipes are actual pipes consisting of the traditional wood used in the violin and bassoon.

The organ's Gehry-designed facade sparked a great deal of controversy, as it includes a large number of pipes deliberately set at odd angles. Some people viewing early renderings and models compared it to a bag of French fries.

After the construction, additional expenses were incurred to correct a flaw resulting from the design's use of polished concave stainless steel surfaces. Residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered significant glare caused by sunlight that was reflected and concentrated in a manner similar to a parabolic mirror. The concentrated light made some rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably hot, caused the air-conditioning costs of these residents to skyrocket, and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Employees of the ticket office reported observing melted plastic traffic cones and spontaneous combustion in trash bins. After complaints from neighboring buildings and residents, the county government stepped in and asked Disney to come up with a solution. Their response was a computer analysis of the building's structure; after the offending surfaces were identified, they were sanded to reduce glare in 2005.

Philip in the  garden terrace at Disney Concert Hall 2006

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Philip on Grand Ave. Los Angeles 2006

Skylights in the Disney Concert Hall Interior

2006

Entrance to the Disney Concert Hall

T H E   C O N C E R T   A T   D I S N E Y   H A L L

LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC
JIRÍ BELOHLÁVEK, conductor
SARAH CHANG, violin

DVORÁK Symphony No. 6
BRUCH Violin Concerto No. 1
JANÁCEK Taras Bulba

The concert we attended featured Sarah Chang in concert with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, guest conducted by Jirí Belohlávek, who recently became Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

26 year old Sarah Chang was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania of Korean heritage. She asked her parents for a violin at the age of 3 and auditioned for the Julliard School at 7 playing the Bruch Violin Concerto. She was admitted into the studio of Dorothy DeLay, violin teacher to some of the world's great violinists including Itzhak Perlman, Midori Goto, Gil Shaham, Shlomo Mintz and many others, including Chang's father. She was also taught by Hyo Kang, a former student and assistant of DeLay.

Chang was recognized as a child prodigy early on and when she was 8, was given the opportunity to audition with such names as Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti, who were working, respectively, with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Both gave her immediate engagements. At 9, she was possibly the youngest violinist ever to record. Her teacher in an interview claimed that no one had ever seen "anything like her".
Yehudi Menuhin has called her "the most wonderful, the most perfect, the most ideal violinist I have ever heard".

Chang played her signature Bruch piece, and was very physically active, swaying and bending, often stamping a foot or gesticulating with much joie de vivre. She is indeed brilliant, making the violin sing and talk in ways we never have heard before. The last piece of the concert, Taras Bulba by Janecek was a delicious and joyful piece that included every part of the orchestra from tubas and harp to triangles and snare drums and included several passages from the famous "french fry" organ, much to my delight. We loved the concert symphony, the hall, the acoustics and the whole damn day actually.

We had thought to go to the Abbey in West Hollywood for apple martinis, but wisely went home instead, via Trader Joe's, and packed for the early morning trip to Big Sur. The next morning we left for Northern California  click here to go to Northern California

Sarah Chang

Jirí Belohlávek, Conductor