SAN DIEGO — Open the doors. Raise the baton. Start the music.

After going through an extensive, four-year redesign and renovation, an 11-month construction delay and a budget of more than $125 million, the San Diego Symphony will resume performing Sept. 28 at the downtown concert hall that has been its indoor home since 1985.

Although the outside of Jacobs Music Center appears much the same as it did in March 2020, when the orchestra played its last concert there before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, the inside’s myriad top-to-bottom changes seem transformative and then some.

“It’s like night and day. It’s like going from black-and-white film to IMAX, or from analog to Dolby Atmos Surround Sound,” said San Diego Symphony Music Director Rafael Payare. “It is amazing — and we are thrilled to welcome everyone into our new home.”

Specifically, a new/old home that has retained its historic essence in a number of ways, while adding an array of innovative new features that will be showcased during the most extensive concert season in the orchestra’s history.

The results bring the 95-year-old venue into a high-tech age nearly one century removed from the hall’s original incarnation. The bones of the building remain the same, including the elegant, art deco ambience, but many other things have been changed.

To improve the sound quality of music in the hall, changes have been made from beneath the stage on up, including removing the outdated HVAC system that had been in the basement and caused distracting vibrations and mechanical humming for musicians during quiet instrumental passages. The hall’s new, state-of-the-art HVAC system — which is suspended between the ceiling of Jacobs Music Center and the parking lot above it — is virtually inaudible in the hall.

The stage is new and so are all the seats for concertgoers, nine rows of which have been removed. The rear of the stage now has a new two-level choral terrace for performances that team the orchestra with vocal ensembles. For singing-free concerts, the terrace will provide up to 90 additional seats that will put audience members this close to the performers on stage.

The entire stage floor has been replaced with a white oak hardwood floor designed with musical resonance in mind. Acoustical tuning chambers have been designed and installed on the stage walls and rear walls throughout the hall. Each multilayered wall now has exterior floor-to-ceiling metal mesh, sometimes known as banker’s wire, to additionally improve the sound quality.

A permanent sound shell has been built and placed on the stage to direct the sound, replacing the temporary shell that had previously been used. Curtains are on hand to be used as sonic dampening devices for amplified, non-orchestral concerts.

Behind the scenes

Backstage, more than 14,000 square feet of previously inaccessible space has been used to add four new floors of offices and storage facilities, up from two floors previously. There are also new dressing rooms, soundproof rehearsal rooms, a greatly expanded music library and musicians lounge, new bathrooms and locker rooms for the orchestra members, a new backstage entrance, and five water-refilling stations, which enable musicians to quench their thirst without taking a hike up or down one floor backstage.

And that’s just a partial rundown of the many additions and upgrades that have been made.

“When we say: ‘Welcome home!’ to the musicians in the orchestra, it’s to a home they never had before,” said San Diego Symphony CEO Martha Gilmer, beaming proudly.

“That is so true,” agreed cellist Richard Levine, a member of the orchestra since 1973 and a member of the musicians’ concert hall renovation advisory committee. “The performance space we dealt with before was one compromise after another. Now, it will be a whole different space that is very inviting to the audience and the orchestra.”

Payare, who began his tenure as the symphony’s music director in 2019, sounded almost awed as he discussed the latest chapter in the 114-year-old orchestra’s history.

“There are things you do to make a new home your own,” said the Venezuelan-born conductor. “Anyone having the good fortune to move into a new place knows that wonderful feeling, and we’re very excited. When people walk in here for a concert, I want them to feel like they’ve escaped from the real world — and to feel not only welcome, but refreshed after they’ve experienced the hall.”

There will be a lot to experience.

Previously known as Copley Symphony Hall (and, before that, the Fox Theatre), Jacobs Music Center is now bigger and — in at least one key way — smaller than ever before.

What was, until four years ago, a 2,248-seat venue is now an 1,831-seat concert hall. The reduction in capacity was undertaken with the specific goal of markedly improving the sound quality and sight lines for performers onstage and audience members in the hall alike.

To accomplish this, eight rows of seating were removed from the rear of the venue’s main-floor orchestra seating section, where the sound quality under the balcony was problematic at best and annoyingly muddled or diminished at worst.

The back row in the balcony was also removed in order to accommodate a new tuning chamber to further help absorb and improve the audio quality. Two other tuning chambers, which were also designed by renowned acoustician Paul Scarbrough, have been added on the stage and at the rear of the hall’s main floor.

The removal of the eight rows downstairs, in tandem with the addition of a new wall there closer to the stage, eliminates much of the previously vexing sound problems in the orchestra seating section under the problematic balcony overhang.

“If you sat close to the stage, the sound went above you, and if you sat on the sides or in the back, the sound went by you,” said cellist Levine, who last year celebrated his 50th anniversary as a member of the symphony. “Onstage, there were sound delays and the musicians couldn’t hear or see each other well.”

And today, after more than $125 million in painstaking renovations?

“Everything is so much better!” Levine said. “I’ve walked around the hall while the orchestra is rehearsing, and there is not a bad seat in the house now. I mentioned how spotty the sound was before. That has been remedied. Every seat is a good seat now.”

This holds true in terms of sight lines as well.

Where previously all of the main floor orchestra-level seats faced the stage in straight rows, hundreds of them have now been positioned at angles so concertgoers can better view the stage. In addition, new aisles were added to provide easier access for attendees, along with soundproofed entrance and exit hallways on both sides of the hall, upstairs and downstairs.

In addition, the outside edges of the stage now extend closer to the audience.

“People will be and feel closer to the orchestra and the music,” Payare enthused. “And the orchestra will be closer to the audience.”

“You just need to see it,” said Gilmer, as she led a visiting writer on a recent tour of the hall. “Until they do, the scope of it is hard for people to imagine.”

Unexpected challenges

Unexpected design challenges in the 95-year-old hall, which opened in 1929 as a movie palace called the Fox Theatre, led to an 11-month delay in completing the extensive renovations. The reopening was pushed back from last year to Sept. 28, and what had been Copley Symphony Hall from 1985 to 2020 has now been renamed Jacobs Music Center, in honor of the generosity of San Diego philanthropists Joan and Irwin Jacobs.

The original $85 million renovation budget has increased accordingly, although the symphony won’t have final figures until after the venue is up and running again. But the renovation’s level of craftsmanship, innovation, and painstaking attention to detail have impressed one of Jacobs Music Center two namesakes.

“I am exceedingly excited,” said Irwin M, Jacobs, the co-founder of Qualcomm. He and his recently deceased wife, Joan, have donated well over $100 million to the symphony over the years.

“I have gone and heard (acoustic) ‘tuning’ performances by the orchestra in the hall,” Irwin Jacobs continued, “and it’s quite an impressive achievement. The hall sounds great and the sightlines are better, too. I’m anxious for people to see and hear what’s been done.”

In fact, it was Jacobs and his wife who set the stage for the rebirth of the concert hall when they initiated a meeting in their home in early 2019, shortly after Payare came on board with the symphony.

Attendees included Payare, Gilmer and acoustician Scarbrough, among others. The purpose of the meeting was to reimagine the symphony’s concert hall altogether.

“Irwin and Joan asked me: ‘What would be the ideal? What do you want the hall to be’?” Payare recalled.

“I said: ‘The orchestra members really need to hear each other. The audiences need to be closer to the stage. We need risers on stage, so the musicians can see each other better. And we could use a choral terrace, like the one in the best concert halls in Europe’.”

Payare, who is also the music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, laughed with delight as he recalled that pivotal meeting.

“I was dreaming and thinking out loud,” he said “And now, a few years later, we have everything we talked about. Dreams do come true! I feel very fortunate and excited for the orchestra and the people of San Diego.”

Gilmer shares that excitement.

“Joan and Irwin listened intently and were very receptive and enthusiastic,” she said. “And Irwin’s engineering background really came out in that meeting, his understanding of sound and how it moves…

“San Diego Symphony is deeply grateful to Joan’s and Irwin Jacobs for their extraordinary philanthropic support. We would not be where we are today without them.”

Next month’s opening of Jacobs Music Center comes barely three years after the debut of The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, the symphony’s $85 million outdoor concert venue next to San Diego Bay. The timing was doubly fortuitous in that, because of the pandemic shutdown of indoor events, the center would have remained shuttered even if it wasn’t closed for renovations.

“The Rady Shell gave us a lifeline,” said veteran symphony cellist Levine. “It enabled the orchestra to keep playing for audiences and remain vital as an orchestra.”

The Shell also quickly earned international attention, including a rave opening-night review in the New York Times and several Canadian newspapers. It was also filmed for the rollout of Apple’s iPhone 13.

Now, Gilmer and Payare hope, the Jacobs Music Center will put the symphony and San Diego on the map again. Like The Shell, the renovations for the concert hall have been underwritten almost entirely by private donors, Gilmer proudly noted.

“The bottom line is we want people to feel at home in the orchestra’s new home,” she said. “We want them to experience something extraordinary — a physical and emotional interaction — with the musicians. Investing as we have in two incredible but very different concert venues, thanks to the tremendous help of philanthropists, will help bring a new vibrancy to San Diego.”

“This will outlive us and serve generations of San Diegans to come,” Payare said. “We now have a world-class concert hall for a world-class orchestra in a world-class city. We are very lucky to be part of this momentum that the city is having, and it keeps growing.”

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