Maurice Abravenel Hall - Salt Lake City, Utah - People-Named Places on Waymarking.com

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Abravanel Hall, home to the Utah Symphony, is a landmark in downtown Salt Lake City. Built in 1979 and called Symphony Hall, it was renamed Abravanel Hall in 1993 for beloved Maestro Maurice Abravanel, conductor of the Utah Symphony for more than 30 years. Known for its acoustics, Abravanel Hall is one of the finest symphony halls in the country. The magnificent building is crowned with six 16 x 16 foot brass chandeliers with 18,000 hand cut beads and prisms of Bohemian crystals imported from Austria and Czechoslovakia, and is adorned with more than 12,000 square feet of hand-applied 24-karat gold leaf. Abravanel Hall was built as part of Salt Lake County's Bicentennial Celebration.

The Man:
Abravanel was born in the Greek Macedonian city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki, Greece), then within the Ottoman Empire . He came from an illustrious Sephardic Jewish family, which was expelled from Spain in 1492 (see Isaac Abrabanel). Abravanel's ancestors settled in Salonika in 1517, and his parents were both born there. In 1909, the Abravanel family moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, where the father, Edouard de Abravanel, was a successful pharmacist.

For several years, the Abravanels lived in the same house as Ernest Ansermet, the conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. The young Abravanel played four-hand piano arrangements with Ansermet, began to compose, and met composers such as Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky. He was passionate about music and knew he wanted a career as a musician. He became the pianist for the municipal theatre and music critic for the city's daily newspaper.

Maurice's father, however, insisted on a career in medicine and sent him to the University of Zürich, where he was miserable at having to dissect corpses. He wrote to his father that he would rather be second percussionist in an orchestra than a doctor, and his father finally relented.

Abravanel lived in Germany from 1922 to 1933, heavily involving himself in the music scene there. He lived in Paris from 1933 to 1936, serving as music director of Balanchine's Paris Ballet, then conducting for two years in Australia. In 1936 Abravanel accepted a post at New York's Metropolitan Opera, becoming at age 33 the youngest conductor the Met had ever hired. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. In 1947 he was hired as music director of the Utah Symphony, and over the next 30 years raised the ensemble to international prominence, leading the symphony in live radio broadcasts and releasing more than 100 commercial recordings.

Abravanel was known as Maurice de Abravanel until 1938. He married singer Friedel Schako in 1933 and the couple moved to Paris that year when the Nazis came to power. The marriage ended in divorce in 1940.In 1947, Abravanel married Lucy Menasse Carasso; they remained married until her death, some 50 years later. He married his third wife, Carolyn Firmage, in 1987. He died in 1993 in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the age of 90.

The Building:
Abravanel Hall is a concert hall in Salt Lake City, Utah that is home to the Utah Symphony and Opera, and is part of the Salt Lake County Center for the Arts. The hall is an architectural landmark in the city, and is adjacent to Temple Square and the Salt Palace on South Temple Street. The hall can hold up to 2,811 occupants.

The Board of the Utah Symphony created a Design and Construction Committee which included Maurice Abravanel, O.C. Tanner, and Jack Gallivan, to advise the architectural design team headed by Bob Fowler. Construction took three years and $12 million.

Abravanel Hall first opened in September 1979, and was originally known as Symphony Hall, but was renamed in May 1993 for Maurice Abravanel, conductor of the Utah Symphony. In 1998, the Hall underwent an expansion project which added wheelchair accessible restrooms, a new Ticket Office, and a new reception room.

The hall is actually a concrete building within a brick building, and was designed by Dr. Cyril M. Harris to provide an environment of acoustic excellence. Harris was the acoustical consultant for the remodeled Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The hall is rectangular in shape, similar to some of the world's finest symphony halls, such as the Grosser Musikvereinssaal in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Symphony Hall in Boston. The stage was designed strictly for use as a concert hall, and has no proscenium - meaning that it is an extension of the audience. Cello and bass players are also encouraged to makes holes in the stage with their endpins, so that their sound resonates with the wood of the hall, and not just their instrument. To enter the hall, patrons must pass through sound lock corridors designed to isolate the concert hall from the noise and confusion of the lobby. Inside the hall, there are convex curved surfaces on the walls and ceilings. There are no perfect ninety degree angles in the hall, because of their effect on sound. Suspended from the ceiling are six 16 x 16-foot (4.9 m) brass chandeliers with 18,000 hand-cut beads and prisms of Bohemian crystals imported from Austria and Czechoslovakia. The lobby is four stories high, with a white oak and brass ceiling, and a 5,400-square-foot (500 m2) glass curtain or wall which covers much of the East face of the triangular-shaped lobby. The lobby itself is an architectural marvel due to its many tiers, the staircase that goes upwards and to the left along with the triangular shape of the enclosure, the gold leafing that covers all visible sides of the stairs and balconies, and the 30-foot-high (9.1 m) red blown-glass sculpture (The Olympic Tower, by renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly) that is displayed prominently in the middle. This piece was purchased in 2002, after private donors and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee raised the $625,000 Chihuly was asking for. The Olympic Tower was valued at $900,000, although Chihuly was willing to sell it at the lower cost under the agreement that it would stay at Abravanel Hall and that the public would be able to view it without attending a show.

This information was taken from Wikipedia.

Year it was dedicated: 1993 Location of Coordinates: At the Front Entrance Related Web address (if available): [Web Link] Type of place/structure you are waymarking: Building

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