Orchestra Hall's Next Movement

Inside Orchestra Hall these days, the excitement is palpable. Osmo Vänskä, the Orchestra’s Finnish music director, stabs the air with his baton, thrusts his arms high, or dips down to quiet the players. The musicians smoke through the score as if their lives depended on it. The audience jumps to its feet and roars its approval.

Minnesota Orchestra leaders say it’s time for their 1970s glass and metal home with the big blue ducts to convey that same sense of excitement.

During the past three years, the Walker Art Center, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis Central Library, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Children’s Theatre collectively spent half a billion dollars to refashion their facilities for the 21st century. Just as the Guthrie translated Artistic Director Joe Dowling’s crowd-pleasing productions into a new cultural complex on the Mississippi River, the orchestra hopes to build on Vänskä’s charisma to give Orchestra Hall’s dated lobby an enticing new look, refine its acoustics, and redo neighboring Peavey Plaza.

“We’ve upgraded most of our cultural facilities,” says Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak. “The orchestra’s turn is next.” The city is supporting the orchestra’s request to the 2008 Minnesota Legislature for $3 million in planning money.

In all, the orchestra is proposing a $90 million renovation. The plan comes at a time when it is enjoying a golden era. In 2005, Musical America named Vänskä conductor of the year. In his four years as music director, Vänskä has led two successful tours to Europe, including a debut at the BBC Proms, a prestigious classical music series held each summer in London. Critics have acclaimed the orchestra’s recordings of the complete Beethoven symphonies on the BIS label.

But symphony halls across the country are populated with gray-haired audience members who grew up when orchestras played on television and Walt Disney cartoons featured classical music. The Minnesota Orchestra staff estimates that 65 percent of season subscribers are over 55. In a highly visual age when 30 seconds is an eternity and interactive is a byword, sitting passively listening to musicians in tuxes and gowns play for 45 minutes straight seems like a tough sell.

The orchestra has been trying to enliven the audience experience. In the new “Inside the Classics” series, for instance, Assistant Conductor Sarah Hatsuko Hicks and violist Sam Bergman “unzip” the orchestra’s formal veneer by introducing both the players and the music that will be played.

But a crucial strategy is a new architectural image, a glassy come-on for what’s inside.

Music of the City

“Orchestra Hall reflects this community very well,” says Paul Grangaard, chairman of the Minnesota Orchestra’s heavyweight board of directors until last December. “It’s aesthetically pleasing in an understated way.”

When Orchestra Hall opened in 1974, Nicollet Mall stopped at 10th Street and Nicollet Avenue’s south end was a strip of seedy one- and two-story buildings. Orchestra Hall and Peavey Plaza, the urbane public park next to it, turned the area around. Soon after Peavey Plaza opened in 1975, Nicollet Mall was extended to Grant Street, where it connected to the Loring Greenway and on to Loring Park. Now the south end of Nicollet Mall is one of downtown’s most vibrant sections.

The central-city business community wants to keep it that way. While the Guthrie, the Walker, and the Institute of Arts are just outside the business district, Orchestra Hall “is the cultural venue located right in the middle of downtown,” says Sam Grabarski, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council. “Patrons will often couple a shopping experience and lunch or dinner or even an overnight stay with an event at Orchestra Hall. All of that promotes commerce.”

The orchestra has been kicking around the idea of a renovation for some time. In recent years, leaks in the roof and other structural and maintenance issues have given the matter more urgency. Discussions about the current plan began in earnest three years ago during the tenure of Tony Woodcock as orchestra CEO.

Grangaard describes the Orchestra Hall redesign plans as a three-legged stool. One leg is remodeling and expanding the lobby, a glass and aluminum shell that wraps around the auditorium. Originally designed by New York architects Hardy Holzman and Pfeiffer Associates, and inspired by the kinetic and colorful Pompidou Center in Paris, Orchestra Hall and its exposed ductwork were cutting-edge. Department store executive Kenneth Dayton drafted the design goals, which called for an informal, welcoming air rather than a columned, gold-flecked elitism.