Went to the new Disney Hall for a concert by the Los Angeles Master Chorale tonight; a friend of ours had one of the solos, so we wouldn’t have missed it. And I’d wanted to get into the hall and hear some music since it opened a month or so ago.

Damn.

Double Damn.I’ve enjoyed watching the building come up, and watching the scaffolding and barricades come down has made an interesting building a wonderful one to drive past.

And inside, it’s even better. We were in the front row center of the Terrace section (one balcony below the top), in the seats given to the artists – not exactly the pricey seats. But the sound was a million times better than in the old Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and better, to my recollection, than any other U.S. concert hall I’ve been in (most of the ones in California, New York, and Chicago). And it’s beautiful!

At a quiet point, someone in the orchestra dropped something – possibly a quarter – and the sound resonated through the hall with amazing clarity.

Oh, and the program and chorus was really, really, good as well.

I hate boondoggle redevelopment. I criticize the Skybox mentality that impoverishes government to ease the lives of the rich.

But I’ve got to say that when it’s done this well, my qualms get left at the door. I know what a quarter of a billion dollars – the cost of the hall – could do for people in this state.

But somehow, coming home from there tonight, I never doubted the worth of what had been built.

I talked about it before, talking about poet Mark Doty:

I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,

brutalizers of animals and one another,
self-absorbed until we couldn’t see
that we ruined, finally,

ourselves – what could we make?
An epidemic ran unhalted,
The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;

the promises of change seem hollow,
the poor and marginal hopelessly marginal,
endlessly poor. I saw no progress,

and the steeping ink of this perception
colored everything, until I felt surrounded
by weakness and limit, and my own energies

failed, or were failing, though I tried
not to think so. I awoke
in Manhattan, just after dawn,

in the tunnels approaching Grand Central:
a few haunted lamps, unreadable signs.
And with a thousand others,

Each of us fixed on the fixed point
of our destination, whatever
connection awaited us, I spilled

up the ramp and under the vault
and lugged my bag out onto 42nd Street,
looking for the Carey Bus.

The dawn was angling into the city,
A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
first a face, not human, terracotta,

on an office building’s intricate portico,
seeming to fire the material from within,
so that the skin was kindled,

glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
they were continuous with every city’s dream

of itself, the made world’s
angled assault on heaven.

…

“…the made world’s angled assault on heaven.”

yessss…