Christopher Burchett as Sweeney Todd filled the Silva with his edgy baritone. Other singers weren’t so clear.
What happens when you perform a ravishing opera but nobody can actually hear it?
Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s close to what happened this past weekend with Eugene Opera’s otherwise splendid production of Sweeney Todd.
Unless you happened to be sitting in an acoustically hot seat — more on the vagaries of that at the Hult Center in a moment — a lot of Sondheim’s beautiful music, and especially his lyrics, got lost in the spacious Silva Concert Hall.
Particularly difficult to hear and understand was soprano Emma Grimsley’s Johanna. Grimsley was often singing upstage, away from the audience, and you just plain couldn’t make out what she was singing. At least I couldn’t, from row R in the orchestra, until after intermission, when general director Mark Beudert had the sound engineer turn up the amplification.
I wasn’t the only one. Alison Kaufman, reviewing for The Register-Guard, couldn’t make out Anne Allgood, who sang the role of Mrs. Lovett. “Unfortunately, her voice … often was lost in the hall or covered by the orchestra. Propitiously, in the second act the floor microphones were turned up and her voice reached us with much greater ease.”
And Suzi Steffen, editor of Lane Monthly and a longtime arts writer in town, posted this on Facebook after seeing the show on Sunday — by when, presumably, the volume dial was turned up for the whole show: “Sad that Silva was too large for some of the singers’ voices. What a bummer.”
Beudert acknowledged over coffee this morning that the sound was not excellent, and that he asked the sound engineer at intermission on Friday to turn the volume up.
“Unfortunately, it’s more complex than turning up a dial,” he said.
Some singers, such as Christopher Burchett, who sang the lead role of Sweeney Todd, have a lot of power and articulation in their voices. Burchett is a baritone with a tenor-like edge to his voice, which makes his diction clear, Beudert said.
But the bigger problem, and one that’s difficult to solve without a demolition permit and tens of millions of dollars, is that the Silva has poor acoustics.
When it was designed and built in the early ’80s, electronic acoustical enhancement was all the rage, and the Silva was designed to be a relatively dead hall to give room for electronic enhancement that could convert the room into multiple acoustical spaces. The theory was that with the flick of a switch it could become an opera hall, a symphony hall, a rock ‘n roll hall or even a cavernous cathedral for an organ concert.
Trouble with that idea was that the electronic enhancement just wasn’t that good. After Marin Alsop took over the symphony here in 1989, she ordered the electronics turned off, saying it sounded like listening to music through a car radio.
The result of turning everything off was, you pretty much couldn’t hear the musicians at all, until the symphony spent a vast amount of money on the shell that now surrounds the orchestra during concerts.
The result is improved, but still mixed. The best seats for a symphony concert in the Silva are up high — the nosebleed seats in the upper balcony, especially on the far right or far left. That’s because you get a big acoustical boost from reflections off the ceiling and side walls of the concert hall.
The worst seats tend to be the ones down in the middle of the orchestra floor. The sound simply shoots overhead without connecting much with the audience.
I wonder whether electronics and acoustical science have progressed enough in the three decades since the Hult Center was built to resurrect the idea of shaping the sound in the Silva with electronic enhancement.
Maybe it sounds too good to be true — or maybe it just sounds like a bad car radio — but I do sort of love the idea of a hall that could be turned, at the flick of a switch, from an opera hall to a chamber orchestra setting.
And then we could all hear the opera.