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Gardner Museum’s new hall an eyeful and an earful

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January 16, 2012|By Jeremy Eichler

The Isabella Stewart Gardners new Calderwood Hall allows performers to… (YOON S. BYUN/GLOBE STAFF )

Over the weekend, a few days before the official public opening of its new wing, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presented a set of performances in its brand new Calderwood Hall. Intended as a chance to thank its donors and supporters, the concerts also offered a sneak preview of the new 300-seat concert venue. My first impressions were that the visuals are stunning, and that the acoustics are a bit complicated. But let’s start at the beginning.

That this new hall exists at all is a testament to the museum’s admirable commitment to music, which is not to be taken for granted. The new wing might easily have included no concert space, or just a standard-issue auditorium. And consider how few classical concerts of any distinction take place around the corner at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The Gardner now has one of the most visually striking small halls you will come across. Architect Renzo Piano and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota have designed a space that is essentially a stageless cube with the musicians performing in the middle of the floor and the audience seated on all four sides, both on the floor and on three levels of balconies that line the cube up to vertiginous heights. Each of the balconies has only a single row of seats.

Plenty of performance venues have seating in the round, but that usually means just a small section of seats placed behind and alongside the orchestra. Here there is no obvious front or back of the hall whatsoever, nor is it clear necessarily where a conductor or soloist would stand, or even how to angle a piano. I hope ensembles will have fun exploring this unusual orientation, and sure enough it seemed the experimentation has already begun. On Saturday night, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and A Far Cry chamber orchestra performed the Haydn Cello Concerto No. 1 with Ma facing inward toward the orchestra, as if closing a circle. The performance became chamber music of the highest caliber.

From a listener’s perspective, facing so many of your fellow audience members lends the hall an appealing living room-like intimacy. On the flip side, listening itself feels like more of a public communal activity rather than a quasi-private affair. At Calderwood Hall, the audience is on display almost as much as the musicians.