Fort Worth Opens New Opera House

Sun., Sept. 20, 1998

Travis Rivers Staff writer

Seattle is the second city in the country to open a new concert hall this year. In May, Fort Worth unveiled the Bass Performance Hall, named for the oil-rich Bass family. The 2,000-seat auditorium looks as though a 19th-century opera house had been snatched from some unsuspecting European city and plunked down on the Texas plains.

Like Benaroya in Seattle, Bass Hall is in a downtown area reclaimed from urban decay. Unlike the Benaroya’s shoe-box shape and clean-lined modernism, the Bass auditorium, designed by architect David Schwarz, is horseshoe-shaped and has old-style European decor right down to house lighting that looks like candles and a dome with a trompe l’oeil sky.

While Benaroya is specifically designed for symphonic music, Bass Hall is a multipurpose hall serving as home to Fort Worth’s symphony, its opera company and its ballet along with playing host to traveling musicals. It was inaugurated with orchestral and chamber music programs, and this summer has seen a national company production of “Phantom of the Opera” and Fort Worth Opera’s “Turandot.”

For all the demands imposed by the multipurpose format, the acoustics - the product of Christopher Jaffe - seemed quite good in a mammoth performance of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and only slightly less good in a chamber music performance by the Ying Quartet. Sharpeared friends say it sounds fine in opera and musicals.

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