Orchestras: Curtain Raiser

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It was at Fulton, Mo., that Winston Churchill first used the term Iron Curtain, in a speech there in 1946. But to the members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, 100 miles east of Fulton, the really troublesome iron curtain was the one that divided the massive Kiel Auditorium into two parts: a symphony hall on one side and a sports arena on the other. Once, Pianist Andre Watts, playing a concerto with the orchestra, heard a strange noise. "I thought something was wrong with the timpani," he said, "but it was only applause for a basketball game on the other side of the curtain." Another time, a union party at the arena got so boisterous that light bulbs began falling into the string section.

Last week the 90-member St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Eleazar de Carvalho, packed up, bade Kiel a long-awaited farewell, and began life anew in Powell Symphony Hall, named for Shoe Executive Walter S. Powell, whose widow had provided a generous endowment for the move. But unlike the new concert halls in Manhattan and Los Angeles, Powell is no monument to architectural modernity. As befits one of the nation's oldest professional orchestras,* the hall is actually the 42-year-old St. Louis Theater, a prime specimen of the garish era of movie-palace construction. The orchestra bought it for $400,000 and converted it into a concert hall for an additional $2,000,000.

More Louis than Loew. The theater, formerly part of the Orpheum chain, had fallen on evil days. Its gaudy decor, a melange of rococo cupids, art nouveau statuary and Buddhist-Byzantine shrines, was shrouded in brownish dust. Decorator Clark Graves painted over most of the Byzantine and the Loew camp, highlighting those motifs which Louis XIV might have allowed in Versailles.

Despite a few grumbles from musicians getting used to the new hall, a black-tie audience at the inaugural concert found the setting pleasing enough. Composer Gunther Schuller conducted his new Fanfare for St. Louis to start things out in properly noisy fashion, and Conductor de Carvalho (who relinquishes his post at the end of the season to Czech-born Conductor Walter Susskind) made further agreeable noise with Benjamin Britten's The Building of the House and Stravinsky's Petrouchka. Some complained that the acoustics were somewhat plushy and over-resonant but at any rate preferable to the bounce of basketball against iron.