The O.C.’s New Reality
Conditioned by reality tv, we tend to judge a location by its prime-time appearance. Thus California’s Orange County becomes synonymous with the inanity of Laguna Beach and The Real Housewives of Orange County.
The offscreen reality, however, is that Orange County possesses a vibrant cultural scene. At the heart of that scene is the newly expanded Orange County Performing Arts Center (ocpac.org), which has the capacity to mount more than 600 performances a year of opera, dance, music, and theater. The additions to the OCPAC debuted last September and include the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall (above), which can seat 2,000, and the more intimate, 500-seat Samueli Theater. The total size of the center is now 260,000 square feet.
Famed architect Cesar Pelli, best known for designing Malaysia’s Petronas Twin Towers (two of the world’s tallest buildings, at nearly 1,500 feet), directed the design of the Segerstrom Concert Hall. For this venue, Pelli took the energy and lightness that he usually channels vertically and allowed them to flow like a wave along the hall’s glassy facade.
Inside, acoustician Russell Johnson and his firm, Artec Consultants, have created an adjustable concert hall that can be tuned like a giant instrument. The hall is equipped with a complex array of canopies, sound reflectors, chambers, and doors that allows conductors to tweak the space to suit every performance on its schedule — which in 2007 will include appearances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
The result is “a pure and beautiful sound in which you can hear instruments with a clarity like never before,” says Judith O’Dea Morr, executive vice president of the Performing Arts Center.
Beautiful, pure, clear sound — and no ultraviolet rays. Catching a concert in Orange County might just beat a day at the beach.
— Aaron Dalton
