I look back now at the past semester, the SF Conservatory’s first in the new building on Oak Street. I’ve gone through some mental shifts about this new building. First I was excited. Then I was awed. Then I was dismayed. Then I was upset. I hated it for a while. But as we really got going with it, and once some of the worst early bugs were out of it, I began to relax.
It helped a lot for all of the concert halls to open. The main concert hall is glorious, pure and simple. The smaller recital hall is terrific, and the little Salon is a nice, although acoustically weird, space. We’re still without some things — the “millwork” remains to be delivered and installed.
But as we settled and became much more familiar with it, we’re all realizing, I think, that it’s really fine and dandy for us. There is enough space, although we were all concerned about practice rooms. Well, we still are, but now the students may use their teachers’s studios, which has opened things up wonderfully. And I’m happy with my office and my classroom.
It was impossible not to discern in last night’s orchestra concert — by far the best performance I’ve ever heard from the SFCM orchestra — that the higher-quality space has been inspiring and helping the students. It was a packed house, which gave us a good feel of the way the hall feels when completely filled. (It sounds very, very good.)
One of my strategies has been to hang around a lot more at night and hear a lot of concerts. It has helped me to reconnect with the school. Funny I would feel the need to ‘reconnect’ with an institution that I have been part of for 32 years, but there it is. However, the reconnection is made and it feels comfortable.