Wednesday, March 26, 2008

The Pavilion also rises


By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer

The Sun Valley Music Pavilion, located on the southwestern end of the soccer field at the Sun Valley Resort, continues its impressive evolution.

The 70-foot-high proscenium arch, constructed in a Tacoma shipyard, was hoisted into place on Thursday, March 13. And on Friday, March 21, Sun Valley Summer Symphony Executive Director Jennifer Teisenger took a tour of the building site with four Summer Symphony musicians: cellist Anne Sagerburg and her husband, violist Morris Jacob (both of the St. Louis Symphony), horn player Lisa Conway,of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and violinist Shawn Weil, also of the St. Louis Symphony, as well as Sun Valley Summer Symphony's new office manager, Sharon Beckwith.

"It's just awesome," Jacob said. "We are so excited. This is going to just change the scope of the Summer Symphony."

The group climbed the scaffolding stairs to a platform on the top where they were able to see how the roof was being constructed. Two supervisors from Pfeiffer, a cable manufacturing company in Germany, are overseeing the placement of the "solid steel cables that will wind together and be winched across trusses," Teisenger said.

The wooden roof will have copper cladding on top.

"Once that is up you'll really be able to see what that looks like," Teisenger said.

The terraced, concentric amphitheatre will seat an audience of 1,500 under nearly half an acre of white fabric, stretched from the proscenium arch to the curved promenade at the rear of the audience.

The exposed walls will be surfaced with 750 tons of imported travertine rock from the Mariotti quarry outside of Rome, which has also been used at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Lincoln Center in New York and the Coliseum in Rome.

The state-of-the-art facility will serve both the Sun Valley Co. and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony in perpetuity.

Sun Valley Co. plans to hold its own summer concert series there, beginning in 2009. The Sun Valley Writers' Conference will also hold events there this summer.

"The agreement between us is that the Sun Valley Co. owns and operates the facility and is providing the majority of the funds to build it," Teisenger said. "The Symphony (which also put up more than $3 million in funds) has been a part of the design process. By the opening (Aug. 3), the pavilion will be performance ready."

This year, the Bronfman Chamber Music Series will be held at Presbyterian Church of the Big Wood due to the intense construction schedule at the Music Pavilion.




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