Page 47 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

Rendering of the Olivier Music Barn at Tippet Rise
We lived in Colorado after New York, and prized the Vilar Center in Beaver Creek, and the Harris Hall in Aspen, as well as the new performance spaces at the campus of the Aspen Music School. We think these are the finest-sounding halls in America, along with Tippet Rise, precisely because they are small and focus the sound very effectively.
So the evolution of the sound of Olivier Hall wasn’t just from three years of visiting Arup halls in Europe, but from a lifetime of concert listening. The Olivier Hall was the seventh studio environment we had built, so we had been hands-on with framing, floors, insulation, wiring, sound isolation. You cannot really fix a hall if it is built imperfectly. You have to tear it down and start again.
The sound of the Olivier Hall as we built it is ultimately like playing inside a cello, and is essentially the same from any seat in the room.
Even if you have a perfect hall, it always needs fine-tuning after it is built. You can’t tell before construction every last frequency which will need reinforcement or softening, or how the hall will sound with a full audience. The tuning we would have done
after construction, however, was put off until our second year, as we opened only an hour after the last nail was puttied.
To maximize the woodiness of the sound during fine-tuning, we placed wood on top of a quarter of the concert floor. The initial plans called for a full wooden floor, but we discovered that too much oak on the floor diminished the sound slightly, so we put enough wood to round the edges of the reflections without damping any frequencies. We also eliminated all right angles in the room with wooden panels, and added cushions to the side benches.
We added more wood, more diffusors, and more cushions, and then eliminated them item by item until the sound was completely perfect. Now every frequency from each instrument can be heard to
its fullest, without any harshness or listener fatigue, or any cancellations of tones from too many similar bounces.
On our opening day, our neighbor rancher Susan Heyneman said, “I’ve heard Bach all my life in many places, but this is the first time I really heard him.” She meant that she could hear each instrument in the Brandenburg Concertos separately, and also hear how they blended together without losing their indi- viduality. That is the sign of a successful hall. Audiophile Audition praised the hall’s “pantheis-
tic colors” in its review of the Pentatone album of
our first season, Opus 2016: www.audaud.com/ domo-tippet-rise-opus-2016-various-works-by-scri- abin-abril-rachmaninov-stravinsky-chopin-pentatone.
We have some twelve concert grand Steinway
Ds at Tippet Rise, including Vladimir Horowitz’s CD-18, which he and Eugene Istomin used for their legendary recordings of the Rachmaninoff concertos.
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