The Fredösphere

The US Army Filed Band & Soldiers' Chorus will be at Hill Auditorium (Ann Arbor) this Friday night.

They Might Be Giants will be at the Power Center Saturday night.

Hill Auditorium is a concert hall with a vast stage capped by a semicircular plaster shell, with quite good acoustics considering its size.  (Just avoid the middle of the main floor and you'll do great.  As is the case in some other auditoria*, you get the best sound if you are sitting near a reflective surface:  a wall, or better yet, the ceiling.)  The recent remodeling greatly increases the comfort and convenience of patrons, and the color scheme chosen (plum, gilt, and smoky blue, is the way I would describe it) is a little unnerving at first, but was a gutsy choice and deserves praise.  I'll never forget going there for the first time as a junior in high school, as part of the 100-member Michigan state honors choir.  Ann Arbor in all respects seemed like a happening cosmopolis to my hayseed-clouded eyes, but Hill Auditorium was the summit of the cherry on top of the creme de la wow -- the world's classiest dirigible hanger.

Power Center is a proscenium stage under a concrete bunker, with very steeply raked seating spread out like a big fan.  Everywhere you look you see the off-putting texture of undressed concrete, except in the lobby where mirrored glass and aluminum framing dominates.  The building knows what it is, and it proceeds to be that exactly, if you know what I mean.  I've performed there once, when the Ann Arbor Cantata Singers and a chamber group from the Detroit Symphony gave Mark Morris' troupe some Vivaldi to dance to.  The tiny pit there barely had room for the strings, so the back doors of the pit were opened up and we singers performed from this weird backstage space where we could see the conductor barely and the audience not at all.  For all anyone knew, we performed in polka dot boxers and bunny slippers.  We were mic'ed (poorly, as we found out later) and the whole experience was everything a live performance should be, but with every bit of immediacy and magic removed.

In recent years, they've allowed ivy to climb up the big blank walls on Power's backside, which softens and humanizes the building.  I like Power Center, I really do.  Like I said, it embraces its cold, forbidding modernist ideals in a way that inspires admiration.  But Hill Auditorium I love.  In the firmament of performance spaces I have known, it is the Polaris.


*I bet this is the only blog you read all day that contains the word auditoria.  "Will the fora be held in the auditoria or the stadia?"  My dream is that I hear that sentence spoken uncontrivedly before I die.  Fat chance.