SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Symphony is no stranger to big headlines. In 2002, after nearly a century of name/venue changes and near/actual bankruptcies, the orchestra — California’s oldest — received a game-changing $120 million donation from Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of San Diego’s leading corporate brand, Qualcomm, and his wife Joan — almost three times more than any U.S. orchestra had ever received at once. Eight years later, the League of American Orchestras deemed the symphony’s budget and orchestral programming grand enough to qualify it as “Tier One.” Only 21 of 700 League orchestras are part of that highest category today.
Then, in 2019, the orchestra made news again when Venezuelan Rafael Payare, an El Sistema grad like Gustavo Dudamel, became its 10th music director, its first true “rising star” appointment. Former music director Jahja Ling was more established when he arrived in 2004, but San Diego was his career pinnacle. And then in 2021, the San Diego Symphony inaugurated The Rady Shell, its stunning 10,000-seat open-air venue on the harbor.
To these headlines must now be added the dramatic, wholly effective renovation of its Jacobs Music Center, unveiled to the general public with an Oct. 4 performance Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection). Originally a stately if cavernous movie palace, the Fox Theatre, which opened in 1929, it became the possession of the San Diego Symphony in 1984 on the condition that the orchestra allow a developer to encase the hall in a 34-story hotel and office structure (Symphony Towers). This feat managed never to touch the Fox’s original walls, preserving the acoustics; alas, they’d never been intended for a symphony orchestra. A dry, dispersed sound kept musicians from clearly hearing each other, bounced their just-played notes back at them in distracting ways, and sounded muddled in some seats.
Efforts to rectify all this began almost from the 1985 debut of the renamed Copley Symphony Hall. Funded partly by a $500,000 donation from the Jacobs family in 1993, acoustically resonant cherry wood floors, a temporary modular orchestra shell, and tiered stage risers for the orchestra’s sections were installed. Still, the acoustical issues — not to mention a dark ambience, poor sight lines, and a cramped backstage — remained.
Though the San Diego Symphony considered a new site, the charms of the old Fox — Rococo ornamentation, ornate chandeliers, 300-pipe historic organ — and significance in civic memory proved too compelling. When Covid forced the orchestra’s performances into the Rady Shell, the orchestra’s CEO, Martha Gilmer, seized the chance to accelerate a $125-million transformation. A team of nearly 200 professionals started work protecting-while-enhancing the DNA of one of the five best-preserved Fox Theatres nationwide, including architects from LA-based preservation specialist HGA, acoustician Paul Scarbrough, and Chicago lighting designer/theater planner Schuler Shook.
The redesign’s sheer ambition and complexity delayed completion from the original November 2023 unveiling until now. It includes:
- A new permanent multi-layered orchestra enclosure — including 25 separate adjustable ceiling panels — complemented in the house walls by fine-tunable chambers for varied programs
- The addition of a permanent, three-sided, 100-seat choral terrace behind the orchestra to provide space for choral pieces and the audience with unique views on non-choral nights
- The removal of the original theater’s structural proscenium (opening up the space/acoustics), the shifting forward (by eight rows) of the hall’s back wall to improve sound, sight lines, and intimacy, and the relocation of the HVAC system from underneath to above the hall to remove ambient sound
- A completely reconfigured main seating level (now 1,700 seats versus 2,200 before) with additional aisles/access and acoustically friendly seats
- Refurbishment of the Fox’s original “Jazz Age” pipe organ, including better sound egress, more classical-ready pipes, and improved organ blowers, and restoration of the old Fox’s elaborate filigree, paintings, and lighting
What better or more symbolic stress-test of the orchestra’s new instrument than Mahler’s heaven-storming Resurrection Symphony, with nearly 200 performers and one of the grandest closing fortissimos in the repertoire. “When we were thinking about what we were going to do with the hall,” Payare said last week, “Mahler’s music, with its range of the softest to the loudest, was at the center of our thoughts.”
The San Diego Symphony’s brass fully exploited the hall’s revamped “surround-sound” acoustic without ever sounding brash or overexposed. In the last movement, the offstage brass summons to Judgment Day managed to sound both appropriately remote and vividly present. From this listener’s seat — in the third-row center of the balcony level (Grand Tier) — brass and woodwind sound was immediate, detailed, alive. Principals Rose Lombardo (flute), Andrea Overturf (English horn), Benjamin Jaber (French horn), and Christopher Smith (trumpet) rose to their occasions with vibrant, almost tangible sonority. Where super-transparent halls can sacrifice consonance, the Jacobs presents a blended unity, as if some invisible mixing engineer were busily sustaining balances. Moments of silence were truly quiet and enveloping, without hum or throb.
Neither a Bernsteinian sentimentalist nor a Boulezian precisionist, Payare showed himself a master of both pacing and dynamic contrast and color. At 86 minutes, his Resurrection is slower than most but never for a moment felt it. He brought a real Viennese lilt to the second-movement “Ländler,” and this listener has never heard a better third movement (“St. Anthony’s sermon to the fishes”): less sardonic irony than ravishing timbre and richly painted color, foreshadowing the final movement’s catharsis.
Swedish contralto Anna Larsson (who made her international debut in Mahler 2 with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic) warmly executed her “Urlicht” and ably joined American soprano Angela Meade in “O Schmerz.” Together, they rode the warm, sturdy foundation provided by Andrew Megill’s San Diego Symphony Festival Chorus through the resurrection theme. This was an opulent, fully satisfying interpretation.
Nits could be picked. The fifth movement might have conveyed a greater sense of emotional arrival; the strings could have been more generously unleashed (in the opening movement’s development and recapitulation, especially); Larsson and Meade might have been given more expressive rein. But the evening was a genuine triumph — for Payare certainly, for the orchestra’s musicians, already mastering their new “instrument,” for the symphony’s committed leadership, and for all the teams behind the sonically splendid new Jacobs Music Center.
The concert opened with Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s 24-minute Time. Its distressed climaxes, eerie sound washes, and unusual percussion (lightweight paper, waterphone/ocean harp, flexatone, thunder sheet) nicely spotlighted the Jacobs’ new acoustics.
