The three city-block campus across the street from San Francisco’s ornate City Hall, known as the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, has become something of an epicenter of high-tech performing arts facilities in the City by the Bay.
The 2,700-seat Davies Symphony Hall has twin Barco HDF-W26 26,000-lumen projectors to provide visuals for the San Francisco Symphony as it plays the background score for films while the audience follows the action on screen. It might be a Hitchcock thriller or a special effects extravaganza. During February’s Super Bowl, it was an evening of highlight reels from NFL Films. The hall uses Meyer Sound’s Leopard Loudspeakers and 900-LFC control system for dialog tracks and amplified PA.
A floor below the symphony hall is the new SoundBox, where a Meyer Sound Constellation® system of digitally adjusted acoustics converted a sonically dead rehearsal space into a vibrant hall for adventurous programming for an audience of up to about 400 (“Breathing Life Into A Dead Space: Acoustical Treatments For SoundBox,” Live Design, March 2015).
Across Grove Street is the 3,126-seat War Memorial Opera House, where the San Francisco Opera offers “Operavision” video displays above the proscenium so that people in the balcony can see close-ups of the action going on four floors below the front railing.
Under its soon-to-retire general director, David Gockley, the San Francisco Opera has been a technological innovator. In fact, Gockley kicked off his tenure in 2006 with a free outdoor simulcast in the nearby Civic Center Plaza. To date, a dozen such simulcasts have been held, nine in 42,000-seat AT&T Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants. In all, more than a quarter of a million people have attended these simulcasts.
Next to the Opera House is the Veterans Memorial Building, which just became a two-venue facility with the opening of the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theatre in a fourth-floor space that was once the home of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Where once the walls echoed to the footsteps of visitors viewing works by the likes of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Henri Matisse, now audiences sit listening to the works of Schubert, Bizet, Grieg, and Cole Porter.
The Taube—a square hall featuring classical symmetry and niches, but with a suspended circular catwalk providing a touch of Star Wars-esque futurism hovering overhead—is a model of flexibility both physically and acoustically due to Meyer Sound’s Constellation system of digitally-generated acoustics. The theatre is part of the brand new 40,000 square foot Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera that also features an education studio and space for the company’s administrative offices, costume studio, and archive. It is the result of a $21 million renovation and seismic retrofit of the space in the 1930s-era building, and it brings functions of the opera company together from far flung locations around the city.
Prominent Bay Area architect Mark Cavagnero faced multiple challenges planning the conversion of the fourth-floor space, not the least of which was presented by the fact that the new Taube Atrium Theatre is located directly above the 928-seat Herbst Theatre, which hosts more than 200 performances a year.
Acoustically isolating the two spaces so that performances, set construction, or rehearsals in one wouldn’t be heard in the other was further complicated by the fact that the Atrium is adjacent to the Herbst’s fly space. Acoustic wall construction and a 6'' floating concrete slab topped by foam, subflooring, and 1'' hardwood floor was required. This meant that the floor of the theatre had to be some 9'' higher than the floor of its lobby.
That the isolation succeeded was amply demonstrated on Sunday, March 13, when a recital featuring mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade in the Herbst overlapped the inaugural presentation of the San Francisco Opera’s new production division in the Taube, OperaLab, a multimedia version of Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise,” featuring the booming voice of baritone Matthias Goerne. While you could hear a trace of the sound from the Herbst in the lobby of the Taube, not a whisper of a sound from below could be heard in the hall itself. Even before the house opened, it was dead silent in the empty house.
Perhaps the most remarkable challenge facing Cavagnero as he set out to plan this renovation of a formerly acoustically hard and even blaring space was to make it as acoustically neutral as possible, while retaining or even returning to its original look. With a neutral space, the sounds picked up by the 24 strategically placed microphones of the Constellation system would be as natural as possible before its computer adjusted them to emulate a selected sonic environment.
“Remember that the space was once devoted to visual art, and museum designers like to have the somewhat echoey footfalls of visitors walking through the exhibits. It gives a sense of excitement to a visit to a gallery,” Cavagnero explains, adding that “a very different environment is best for a space devoted to musical art.”
Electroacoustic Architecture
The acoustics team of the design firm Arup worked with Mark Cavagnero Associates to handle the issues of sonic ambiance throughout the 40,000sq-ft. of the entire Wilsey Center, including the challenge of the Taube Theatre. Led by Arup’s associate principal Kurt Graffy, the team devised the combination of plenums, spacers, and chambers for the theatre’s walls, which also contain the 75 self-powered loudspeakers of the Constellation system to provide what Meyer Sound’s founder John Meyer calls “electroacoustic architecture.”
Using a Meyer D-Mitri® digital audio platform running Variable Room Acoustic System (VRAS™) algorithms, Constellation can be set to emulate the sound you would hear in different spaces. Indeed, it can switch from the approximation of one space to that of another at the flick of a switch to “virtually adjust the shape of a venue.” This is particularly valuable for a hall like the Taube that is intended to be used for a wide variety of programs. Chamber music, for example, is often played in a space where reverberation decays down to the noise level of the room in one second, while symphony halls often aim for a two-second delay. Sacred spaces, where choral works sound best, may have three full seconds of decay. The Constellation system doesn’t only manipulate decay, however. It also approximates the immediate reflections which would come from surfaces within the space.
Constellation uses an array of 24 widely distributed microphones suspended from the modernistic-looking catwalk. The system also includes multichannel playback capabilities and the SpaceMap® surround panning feature that allows sounds to seem to move around the space.
Meyer applications director for digital products, Steve Ellison, says the sum total of the digital capabilities of the system give the theatre a “chameleon-like quality” that performers, directors, and even composers will use in years to come in ways we can’t even guess today. “Acoustics can be an instrument in itself, a compositional tool,” says Ellison. “Someday, somebody will be writing for the room.”
Elkhanah Pulitzer, who will program events in the Taube for Opera Lab, says she is “no longer limited by the shape of the room or whether the acoustics will support a new performance idea.” San Francisco Opera’s Gockley envisions leaving “a legacy for future generations to dream in ways we cannot presently imagine.”
The flexibility provided by acoustic adjustability is matched by the physical adjustability of the new venue, essentially an empty box with a storehouse across the hallway filled with collapsible risers, platforms, and chairs that can be brought in and set up in a wide variety of configurations. Staging Concepts of Minneapolis provided their SC90 aluminum framed stage and riser platforms as well as aisle stairs, handrails, and mesh side closures to the venue.
The seats were custom designed and manufactured by the Italy-based firm Segis. They are upholstered in order to be similar in sound absorption to clothed people so that the sonic environment is not impacted too much by the level of attendance at a performance. Each of the seats has its own cup holder. Gockley specified this feature to signal that this is to be the Opera’s informal space, where patrons are welcome to attend with a glass of wine or other libation.
The drive for flexibility was not confined to acoustics or adjustable audience and stage platform configurations. Advanced capabilities for multimedia productions were designed-in from the start. Cavagnero’s office worked directly with the Opera’s technical staff, including director of production Daniel Knapp and associate technical director Ryan O’Steen. At their request, the original plan for a truss system was replaced with the futuristic-looking catwalk, which gives the staff the ability to hang and focus lights and projectors more rapidly. “The goal was to allow changeovers in a day or so, which we couldn’t do with trusses,” says O’Steen.
It was also at the request of the Opera staff that alternative wall coverings were tested on the stage in the Opera House to determine how they would handle lighting and projections. “We found that the darker of the fabrics actually gave a better result so that is what we’ve got,” says O’Steen. This was particularly important as the company has plans after this inaugural season to map all four walls in order to allow projections to create what O’Steen calls “virtual wallpaper, to provide an immersive experience that will be different for each production.”
They have not selected the hardware or software for this capacity, using equipment from the company’s current stock for this first season. “We found our projector to be too noisy without baffles, so we’re using a Christie 10K for now,” he says.
Most everyone we spoke with, however, whether involved in the sonic, visual, or the configuration aspects of the project stressed the belief that the hall’s flexibility will allow artists to develop unexpected and exciting new programming. In O’Steen’s words, “Wonderful surprises will come out of that room.”
Brad Hathaway has provided reviews and theatre-related news and features for newspapers, magazines, and websites for nearly 20 years. Before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, he established a national voice in the theatre community from Washington, DC. He became the Broadway correspondent for Musical Stages Online and the Washington correspondent for Theatre.com. In 2001, he established Potomac Stages, the first comprehensive website covering community and professional theatre in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia. In 2008, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Theatre Critics Association, and he currently serves as the vice chair of the Association’s Executive Committee. He and his wife live on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.
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