I have the softest little black bag that the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra gave to me as a subscriber at the concert last night with a little Post-It calendar in it and I feel like it should be useful but I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. It goes with the new color of the walls in the hallways of Symphony Hall, which were painted black. There are new portraits of the musicians, too, which are in vibrant color and in which everyone is dressed smart casual instead of how they dress on stage. I’m honestly not happy about the dark wall – it now feels even more cramped when the auditorium is emptying out. And the pictures seem kind of disingenuous if they’re going to keep the men of the orchestra performing in tails. It’s not really that bad, though: just not what I’d do. I was pretty happy at first to see that they got rid of the two projection screens hanging off of the proscenium on either side of the stage in favor of one large one suspended from between some of the acoustic shell’s drop panels – sitting in row C made the old ones a bit uncomfortable to watch – but then I noticed that they kept the projector in one of the little compartments in the mezzanine so now we have three lines through anything they put up there from the shadows cast by the hanging microphones over the stage. They do get credit for trying, though, and I think they finally fixed the torn cloth cover over one of the built-in speakers, which is unquestionably a positive. Maybe if I ever become a multi-decamillionaire then I’ll grant them the money for a real renovation.
Continue reading →