{"id":3416,"date":"2021-06-01T06:28:13","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T10:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.icsom.org\/senzasordino\/?p=3416"},"modified":"2021-06-01T08:01:50","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T12:01:50","slug":"a-double-shot-of-reopening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.icsom.org\/senzasordino\/2021\/06\/a-double-shot-of-reopening\/","title":{"rendered":"A Double Shot of Reopening"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I<\/span> remember that when I first arrived in Milwaukee in January of 1988, I went to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra offices. They were located in the office building above an old movie theater, in a part of downtown that could have used a little sprucing up. Thirty-three years later, the MSO offices are back in the same building above the theater, but everything else is different.<\/p>\n

The 1931 art deco building was the Warner Grand Theater until 1995. Rapp & Rapp of Chicago, an architectural firm responsible for many other movie palaces subsequently converted to concert halls in such places as Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, delivered a mixture of Beaux Arts, rococo, and baroque decor, at a cost of almost $50 million (in 2020 dollars).<\/p>\n

The project to turn it into a symphony hall had been about twenty years in the making. In the year 2000, the orchestra did an acoustical test at the Grand Theater, using a temporary stage. We were thrilled at the clarity and warmth. Then we put it all aside for an awfully long time, due to lack of interest from donors and city government, which would need to narrow the street behind the hall to make room for a stage and backstage facilities.<\/p>\n

In recent years, however, major donors and the city both came to realize that converting the old movie palace into a modern concert hall was a win-win for everyone. Our management and board made a convincing case that control of our own venue\u2014sorely lacking in our previous county-owned \u201chome\u201d\u2014was essential to the MSO\u2019s survival, while the city came to see that the area immediately around the theater desperately needed a spark to ignite renovation and development of the center of downtown.<\/p>\n

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Photo credit: Ilana Setapen<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Renovation began in 2018, and went smoothly, including moving a 625-ton wall 35 feet\u2014in one piece\u2014as required to qualify for $15 million in historic preservation credits. Fast forward to 2020, we were not able to open the new hall as we had planned, because of COVID-19 and a downtown steam tunnel flood that destroyed new electric equipment in our basement. We had last performed in mid-March 2020, and management waited until the fall of 2020 to negotiate a pandemic agreement. Our first masked and distanced chamber music concerts began at the new Bradley Symphony Center in early February, for a virtual audience only. \u201cWhen I walked on stage for the first rehearsal in our new hall, my jaw literally dropped,\u201d said Robert Levine, MSO violist and Local 8 president. \u201cThe hall looked brand-new; all of the gorgeous French Renaissance murals had been painstakingly restored and just glowed. The stage was visually very warm and welcoming. And the first words out of my mouth reverberated throughout the entire space. It\u2019s only the second or third time in my life that I\u2019ve fallen in love with a hall at first sight and sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

In-person audiences returned to MSO performances in April, and at this point the plan is to continue to limit the audience to 150 people for the remainder of this season. Some of the features we\u2019ll all eventually be enjoying:<\/p>\n