Word: ordways
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...Susan E. Ordway...
...Powell Hall in St. Louis and the Paramount Theater in Oakland, or gleaming, high-tech edifices like Davies Hall in San Francisco and Meyerhoff Hall in Baltimore. Last week in St. Paul, Architect Benjamin Thompson, the designer of Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, unveiled a stunning combination: the Ordway Music Theater, a $45 million jewel overlooking the Mississippi that is one of the handsomest public spaces for music in America...
...Ordway evokes an earlier era visually, acoustically it is right up to date. Like its counterparts in Baltimore and San Francisco, it is "tunable." Unlike them, though, the hall's adjustable panels, which can alter the reverberation time from 1.4 to 2.2 sec., are not hung awkwardly in public view, but instead are hidden in the ceiling and recessed behind slats in the walls. New halls usually take some time before they sort themselves out acoustically: at first hearing it appears that the Ordway's sound, designed by Acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard of Chicago, is rich and clear...
Animalen, however, was not the best choice to inaugurate the Ordway operatically, even though it reflects both the region's Scandinavian ethnic background and the Minnesota Opera's long-standing commitment to new works. More a politically pacifist, musically jejune cabaret than an opera, it concerns a convention of animals that are worried about the nuclear arms race. They lecture representatives from the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the importance of avoiding war, and later turn up at a peace conference in Vienna. There a romance between a Las Vegas-type American entertainer and a Soviet chanteuse ends...
...company that premiered Conrad Susa's magical chamber opera Transformations in 1973 and has championed resident Composer Dominick Argento could have chosen a better piece for this occasion. Perhaps Argento's Casanova's Homecoming, scheduled for April, will prove to be such a work. A performing space like the Ordway deserves...