Friday, September 17, 2010

Evolution of pavilion enshrined in print

New coffee-table book chronicles creation of iconic amphitheater


By VAN GORDON SAUTER

The Sun Valley Pavilion opened in the summer of 2008, enveloped in more than 1,000 tons of fine Italian marble.Photo courtesy of Sun Valley Resort

It's hard to imagine a modern event as consequential to the Wood River Valley as the creation of the Sun Valley Pavilion, a premier outdoor music venue that ranks in acoustics and aesthetics with such venerable America sites as Tanglewood and Wolftrap and the Hollywood Bowl.

The pavilion, which seemingly rose overnight on the Sun Valley Esplanade, has energized the community, both as a source of local pride and as a terrific site for cultural or popular entertainment.

To spend one's day fishing or golfing or hiking in the natural beauty of our valley, and then to spend a summer evening in such a stimulating environment with Itzhak Perlman or Garth Brooks or Emmanuel Ax is, to put it mildly, quite remarkable, even for this posh little community in the rural Rockies.

The evolution of the pavilion is documented in an oversized book (18.5 inches by 13.5 inches, and 9.5 pounds) edited by Shannon Besoyan, and published this month by Sun Valley Resort. There is a special leather edition of 150 copies at $250 each in addition to the 1,000 regular copies priced at $95, available at Sun Valley Lodge gift shop.

A numbing vanity book? No. Earl and Carol Holding, owners of the resort who underwrote the $40-million-or-so pavilion with Sun Valley Symphony patrons, are certainly prominent in the book, but it was they who ushered the site to reality and drove a quest for quality that extended far beyond that which was necessary to make a prestige statement.

In effect, this is a lasting, loving document about how one of the great institutions of the American West created a contemporary cultural landmark emblematic of its continuing leadership and relevance.

The real players in this photo/text book are the designers, architects, artisans and builders who gave form and sound to the aspirations of the owners and patrons. Besoyan—a Sun Valley employee—asked them to put to paper their creative challenges and the passion they brought to the project. These are people not given to mawkish sentiment and their stories are laced with professional details. They also convey a true emotional investment in what for many of them may be the most unusual project of their careers.

Nic Goldsmith, the senior principal of the FTL design engineering studio, relates that "covering this sacred area, we developed a ... wooden chamber over the stage much like the inside of a violin."

Fabrizio Mariotti owns a quarry in Tivoli, just outside Rome, that has been in the family since 1890. They provided 1,000 tons of travertine marble for the pavilion, like the travertine that wrapped St. Peter's Basilica and the Roman Colosseum.

Mariotti came to Sun Valley to meet with the Holdings. "I felt infected by their dream ... so much that the economical aspect of the business became not so relevant ... or was not the goal. I felt that the quality of what my brothers and I were doing ... was much more important."

You can also learn hundreds of "can-you-top-this?" facts, such as the structure's containing 85 miles of electrical wiring or 20 miles of conduit.

Ultimately, what normally would have been a two-and-a-half-year construction project took less than a year, and the local landscape changed, both physically and emotionally. The valley made a significant step toward parity with other top-ranked seasonal performance venues. The largest privately funded, free-admission symphony in the country now has a world-class home.

One feels a vulnerability to being considered a toady for such enthusiasm about both the pavilion and a book that celebrates it. But the pavilion and this book speak for themselves.

The pavilion as a site and as a symbol has ratcheted up the character of cultural life in the valley—and will continue to do so.

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that architecture is frozen music. If so, words and images must create frozen ideas. This is a book about ideas and passion and skills that created a home for music and performance. Like our community itself, there is in this book a slight whiff of the self-referential. But it is peripheral and irrelevant. This is a book about a festival of creativity more than worthy of appreciation.




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