Today, it seems almost inconceivable that for much of its history the Utah Symphony was without a home. For the first 40 years of its 60-year existence, the symphony had no concert hall it could call its own.
Now, of course, Abravanel Hall -- or Symphony Hall, as it was originally called -- has become synonymous with the Utah Symphony in much the same way that Maurice Abravanel has come to symbolize the orchestra as we know it today. However, the hall had a long germination period from concept to reality. There were many obstacles and a good deal of opposition that had to be overcome before the concert hall came to fruition.But thanks to the perseverance of a few influential people, Abravanel Hall grew to become one of the crown jewels in the cultural tiara of Salt Lake City.
Donald L. Andrews, president and CEO of the Utah Symphony, refers to it: "A cornerstone in the modern era for the arts in Salt Lake City, and a hall for the entire state to be proud of."
Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini says the hall is "stunning and spectacular, and critical to the cultural life in the city and in the state."
The hall was originally conceived in 1967 as part of the old Salt Palace complex, but the plan had to be scrapped due to insufficient funds, and it wasn't until the early 1970s that the idea resurfaced.
When Maurice Abravanel became music director of the Utah Symphony in 1947, he came to an agreement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which allowed the symphony to give performances in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. This was a marked improvement for the orchestra; before Abravanel came, the orchestra had no steady home -- it simply played wherever it could find an empty auditorium.
However, even though the orchestra now had a regular facility and was able to use it without paying any fees, it was still a far cry from the perfect solution. Playing in the Tabernacle placed limits on the number of concerts the orchestra could give, the orchestra still had to rehearse elsewhere, and, of course, since the Tabernacle is a religious building, church events took precedence over concerts. Still, it was a step up for the Utah Symphony, and the orchestra would call the Tabernacle home for 32 years.
Then two things happened at roughly the same time that gave renewed impetus to building what would eventually be known as Abravanel Hall.
According to Herold L. ("Huck") Gregory, who was the executive director of the Utah Symphony at the time, the LDS Church leadership decided in the mid-'70s that it was time for the symphony to have its own hall. "The First Presidency (of the LDS Church) met with (then-Utah Symphony president Wendell J.) Ashton, Abravanel and myself and told us that, even though we could use the Tabernacle for as long as it was in everyone's interest, maybe the time had come for the symphony to have a home of its own, because of how the orchestra had grown and expanded over the years."
While the LDS Church was gently nudging the Utah Symphony toward finding new quarters, the state Legislature was involved with plans for celebrating the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. Congress voted in 1973 to divide $1 billion among the 50 states to be used to construct buildings for the nation's bicentennial, and Utah's share of the money was to be $13 million. And the Utah Bicentennial Commission, chaired by Obert C. Tanner, declared that the major project for 1976 would be the construction of a performing arts center in Salt Lake City.
The First Presidency of the LDS Church endorsed the plan, issuing a statement that said: "We are pleased that plans are being considered to construct the concert hall. . . . Our city and state have long needed such a facility. Its construction and use will coincide with the policy of the Church followed from the earliest days of our history of encouraging and supporting projects which improve the cultural and artistic climate of our community."
However, Congress failed to pass the bill allocating money to the states. So the Utah Legislature stepped in and appropriated $6.5 million from the state general fund toward construction of a performing arts facility, provided that another $6.5 million be raised by January 1, 1976. Failure to do so would result in the state's money going back into the general fund.
Gov. Cal Rampton then created a "blue ribbon committee" of prominent citizens to look into the ways and means of getting the money to match the state's $6.5 million. This committee was headed by John W. Gallivan and was to serve as an adjunct of the Utah Bicentennial Commission. It decided that the best way to obtain the money was through a general obligation bond, which was approved by the Salt Lake County Commission and put before the voters in a special election.
Gregory explains, "We needed a bond, and so an election was held. But the bond was for $49 million, and it included money for parks and recreation and other things, and it failed. Next year we were back, and this time the bond was for about $9 million, and it was only for a performing arts center, and it passed."
This second election, held in December 1975, was a fairly close vote, and the bond passed by about 7,200 votes, or 56 percent of the votes cast. The election drew 22.5 percent of Salt Lake County's 260,000 registered voters -- which at the time was a record for a bond election.
Originally, the idea was to construct three buildings: one for the Utah Symphony, one for Ballet West and one for a visual arts center. But that was scaled down to one multi-purpose hall with the art center built next to it.
Famed acoustician Cyril M. Harris was hired to design the inside of the new hall. But when he discovered that the hall was to be a multipurpose facility he refused to accept the job. According to Gregory, "Harris was speaking in San Diego at the time. So Obert Tanner and Richard Eyre went there and spoke with him. Harris said, 'No, it won't work. A multipurpose hall never works.' "
And Harris was speaking from experience. When Avery Fisher Hall in New York was renovated, Harris was called in to do the acoustical design. "He gave it a shoebox shape and put in wooden floors, and made (the hall) work," Gregory said. "It's not the greatest hall, but it works."
Keith Lockhart, current music director of the Utah Symphony, echoes that sentiment. "Everyone curses Avery Fisher. I haven't conducted there yet, but I've heard concerts there, and I agree with the criticisms. The sound isn't very good."
Some serious rethinking of the project had to happen at this point. Luckily for everyone concerned, Ballet West came to the rescue when it made public the fact that it would prefer performing in a renovated Capitol Theatre than in a new multipurpose hall. That would leave the new hall dedicated to the symphony, and Harris accepted the job of designing the acoustics.
Harris' goal was to make the hall one of the best in the world. "It will be something Utahns can be proud of," he said at the time. Harris, who had a doctorate in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who taught at Columbia University, had designed the acoustics in several famous buildings -- including the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Lockhart has nothing but praise for Abravanel Hall's acoustics. "I've said it before, I think I have to be the luckiest two-orchestra conductor in the world. I have Symphony Hall in Boston, which is one of the great old halls, and I have Abravanel Hall, which is one of the great modern halls. I can knock on wood.
"(Abravanel Hall) is very easy to work in. You hear the perimeters of the stage, and you get a very accurate sound."
It was Harris who determined the basic shape of the hall, its dimensions, the size and shape of the stage and how much the balconies would overhang. In effect, he provided the architects with the rules and requirements for the design work.
"It was a new design," Gregory points out, "there was no proscenium and no curtain."
The architects for the project were Robert A. Fowler Associated Architects (now Fowler, Ferguson, Kingston and Ruben Architects). They had also designed Brigham Young University's Marriott Center and planned the Harold B. Lee Library on the BYU campus and the Dee Events Center at Weber State University in Ogden.
The new concert hall and adjoining art center were to be built on the north parking lot of the Salt Palace. The LDS Church donated to Salt Lake County two acres of land west of the site for parking, to replace the parking lot where the hall was to be built. Later, the church donated another two acres across West Temple for a future parking lot.
In donating the land, the church proposed an agreement similar to the one it made with the county when it donated the land for the Salt Palace: the county would lease the property for $1 a year with an option to buy the land after 50 years.
There was opposition galore to the plan. Many people were incensed that a public building would be built on church land, while others objected to the cost of the project (which eventually would total $18.8 million), including the city of West Jordan, whose mayor and city council went on record as opposing building a concert hall because of the expense involved.
But in spite of this, the project went full speed ahead. The groundbreaking ceremony for the hall took place on March 10, 1977, at 1 p.m., exactly 10 years to the hour from the occasion when ground was broken for the Salt Palace. And as if to further underscore the connection with the Salt Palace, the four shovels that were passed around to the 20 dignitaries taking part in the ceremony (including Gov. Scott M. Matheson, Rampton and Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson) were the same ones used 10 years earlier. The music was provided by the Davis and Kearns high school bands, from the same schools that played for the Salt Palace ceremony.
The Utah Symphony gave a free outdoor concert when the cornerstone was set in place on Oct. 22, 1977. A time capsule was placed in the cornerstone containing a scroll with the signatures of all those who attended the concert, along with copies of the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune for Oct. 22.
The Utah Symphony had planned to perform the 1978-79 season in its new home, christened Symphony Hall, but delays in the delivery of materials, a shortage of some laborers and a strike by the roofers forced the opening to be pushed back until the beginning of the 1979-80 season, Sept. 14, 1979.
Abravanel was fated never to conduct in the hall that now bears his name. The legendary maestro retired from conducting at the end of the 1978-79 season, after having undergone bypass surgery two years earlier. "The operation took something out of him," Gregory says, "although after the operation, he took the orchestra on a four-week tour of western Europe.
"But before a concert in Ogden, he said suddenly he couldn't do it, so Ardean Watts (the assistant conductor of the orchestra at the time) came in and conducted the concert.
"The doctors told him not to overdo it, and he told me, 'This is the end of the road, doctor's orders. I'm through conducting.'
"I said to him, 'Maurice, don't do it.' I was afraid that giving up conducting would kill him. I pleaded with him to conduct at the opening of the hall, but he refused. 'What if I agree to conduct and then I can't,' he said. 'Who will you get to replace me on such short notice?' "
Symphony Hall opened its doors to fanfares and church bells ringing throughout the city. The first concert in the new hall was under the baton of guest conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who led the orchestra in Brahms' Symphony No. 4 and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.
The official ribbon-cutting ceremony took place a couple of days before opening night. At that time, the fountain in front of the plaza was also turned on for the first time, dazzling the onlookers with its "wall of water" curtain. The fountain was a gift from Obert C. Tanner, who had made a habit of donating fountains throughout the city, including the one on the LDS Church office grounds. Tanner once said, "A fountain renews itself, and so it becomes an aesthetic experience, and has spiritual value. . . . In this arid country we live in, fountains are needed."
Opening night was a huge success. Music critics from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times attended the opening night performance. But while everyone applauded the acoustics of the new Symphony Hall, the reviews on Skrowaczewski's conducting were mixed. The critics from Los Angeles and New York by and large panned Skrowaczewski's interpretation, while the Deseret News' own William S. Goodfellow had nothing but praise for the concert. Speaking of the Bartok concerto, he wrote, "Instrumental definition throughout was extraordinary and even in the softest passages one sensed that what he was hearing was exactly what the conductor intended." The Brahms symphony, on the other hand, "seemed almost carved from stone -- large, imposing and as solid as granite. Intensity was the watchword here."
What had taken so long to come about was, in the end, well worth the wait. Only one thing was missing, though: a lasting tribute to the man who had done so much to promote the arts in Utah. That was rectified in 1993, on the occasion of Abravanel's 90th birthday, when the name was officially changed to Abravanel Hall.
And in its 20-year history, the hall has indeed become, as Gov. Mike Leavitt puts it, "a cultural landmark in our state and a tribute to the strength of the arts in our community."