ZANKEL HALL'S DEBUT

A bit of groundling music criticism seems in order. Even if it's not a view from the Ivory Tower, it might be worth two-and-a-half cents. Frankly, Carnegie Hall's spanking new venue, the 650-seat Zankel Hall, seems like a knockout to me. Maybe I should equivocate, as the Ivory Tower boys do, by pointing out that Wednesday night's pre-opening concert was only my first time in the hall and that my judgment may be clarified by a second, third, fourth and fifth, etc. hearing.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what the music critic Terry Teachout, fellow Arts Journal blogger, and New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini are being so acoustically picky about in their commentaries. I agree with Tommasini that soft came across better than loud. But I didn't hear any of the subway rumbling that so disturbed Teachout.

I thought Renée Fleming was marvelous in the opening song, "Shatter Me, Music," an unaccompanied performance of a John Corigliano composition with words from Rilke, and especially in Richard Strauss's "Morgen," accompanied on piano by Emanuel Ax. "Morgen" was plain gorgeous, maybe the best single performance on the program. Lucky for us, too, because it was an added attraction not listed in the program notes. Fleming introduced it wryly, referring to herself in the third person, to show "what she can do."

I have to disagree with Teachout when he says the drum kit in Kenny Barron's quintet sounded boomy -- the young, female drummer Kim Thompson was a smash in my book -- though I agree the vibraphone sounded muddy, despite Stefon Harris's flashes of virtuosic playing. I wonder, too, why Teachout calls the hall "distinctly bass-shy." From where I sat, sixth row center, it didn't seem that way at all. In fact, the plucked cellos in Villa-Lobos's "Bachiana brasileria" sounded as catchy as a guilty pleasure.

I take Teachout's point about the lack of a center aisle. Having one would be a relief. But with all due respect, when he describes the hall as "attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism," I prefer to call it a good-looking hall without froufrou. It's an intimate, honest venue intended for all sorts of music rather than a dandified palazzo.

My reaction is doubtless colored by having spent too much time in Southern California's Segerstrom Hall at what used to be called the Orange County Performing Arts Center. When that cavernous pink pile opened in the mid-1980s, its arch-conservative benefactors thought it was the last word in gaga all-purpose design. If Teachout or Tommasini had ever spent any time there, they'd know how lousy acoustics can be.