The Mort News

Dallas City Council readies Meyerson Symphony Center handoff to DSO

The Mort will get a new boss.

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The city of Dallas is preparing to turn over management and operations of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center to the Dallas Symphony Association in a deal that is hoped to bring millions to be used for critical maintenance needs.

The Dallas Symphony Association is the administrative arm of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

This follows similar recent moves to delegate city facilities to private management, including the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

The deal still requires approval by the Dallas City Council, which will vote at its meeting on May 22. The lease has been hashed out since January in several meetings and a public hearing that included arts organizations that perform there.

The agreement has received support from Arts and Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission and the council's Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee, as well as the arts community.

It will direct the Office of Cultural Affairs to lease the Meyerson to the DSA for $1 a year for 99 years. DSA will raise $5 million for capital improvements required by 2025.

Under the current agreement, the DSA has been the Meyerson's primary user, leaving the city responsible for operation and management. But the city has long deferred maintenance. Designed by I.M. Pei and constructed in 1989, the building will require up to $11.9 million in critical repairs.

“The Meyerson needs a lot of love from everyone involved,” says DSA VP of facilities Debi Peña.

Peña recently led a group that included Arts and Commission member Cannon Flowers and Preservation Dallas Board Joanna Hampton on a tour to show problem areas, some in non-public spaces such as the rehearsal rooms and the reverb chamber located directly behind the Lay Family Concert Organ on stage.

One big problem has been water. It leaks into the building through the glass pavilion rooftop encasing the lobby and collects in pools across the floor. According to Peña, whenever it rains, staff must scatter buckets and tubs across the mezzanine loge to prevent flooding.

Walls in the lobby and backstage are stained with rainwater that flows heavily in through dozens of leaks throughout the concert hall.

The famed Kelly Ellsworth panels, worth millions of dollars in the public art collection, now have discreet gutters redirecting stormwater seeping in from above. Granite is marred with water stains.

There are also accessibility issues. There is only one ADA-compliant bathroom in the building. And elevators have a tendency to get stuck. On several occasions, patrons have been unpredictably trapped inside elevators for hours after a show waiting for the fire department to come to the rescue.

Sometimes when a pipe bursts, maintenance crews simply cut the water off, which means an upper level backstage bathroom is closed. Sinks in the conductor's Green Room, which hosts donors and special guests, haven't worked in months.

Inside the McDermott Concert Hall, lighting and sound system upgrades need a $1.2 million retrofit. The original carpet needs to be replaced, as do 26 of the 77 reverb doors.

The last improvement was in 2014 when new heat and air conditioning systems were installed as part of a citywide facility efficiency upgrade.

Another big change will be scheduling of the venue. Up until now, scheduling was handled by the city and done in advance, with priority given to DSA events. Under the new deal, the DSA will oversee all booking, including performances and private venue rentals.

There are 10 legacy organizations including the Dallas Winds, Dallas Bach Society, and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, that are grandfathered with rental and other fees locked in for 10 years.

The new agreement will also affect 37 city employees, including ushers, sound technicians, and stage technicians. They'll be offered positions with the DSA or reassigned in the city for those wanting to hold onto their pension and other benefits.

After approval May 22, the Symphony would take over management and operations July 1. Renovations will begin after that with a bulk of improvements slated for summer 2020.

The city will pony up its share for improvements, with an added $3.85 million in 2017 bonds. Cultural Affairs will continue funding operations at the Meyerson for five years, winding down its annual investment each year. By year four of the five-year wind-down, it is hoped that the city will begin saving money.

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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