The $20 million hall was designed by Epstein Joslin Architects and the acoustician Larry Kirkegaard, the team involved in creating Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall, and you can feel the family resemblance between the spaces. Inside, the new hall is visually striking yet it still exudes a core warmth thanks to the intimacy of its scale — it holds 330 people — and the tonal palette of the walnut wood and Douglas fir used in its construction. The interior walls are lined with untold numbers of tiny flat stones, introducing a vaguely Eastern element. But the pièce de résistance is the massive window at the back of the stage that looks out directly onto Rockport Harbor.
The sound is important — we’ll get to that — but so is the general frame of mind that a concert space can induce in a listener. And at least Thursday night, this space conjured a sense of calm focus. It is a hall for serious listening — and yet it rejects the notion that such listening requires a hermetic seal from the world outside. Even when large wooden screens are slid across the window, the light penetrates through small openings in the basket weave of the wood, reminding you that this music is buttressed by sea and sky.
In conceiving the opening set of concerts, artistic director David Deveau aimed for maximum sonic range. On Thursday night, Deveau and two colleagues gave the premiere of Scott Wheeler’s attractive, jaggedly lyrical Piano Trio No. 4, “Granite Coast,’’ and Bruce Hangen led a small chamber orchestra, whose ranks included members of the BSO and the Borromeo Quartet, in Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll’’ and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.’’
