MUSIC

This fall one of the major artistic events in the country, not just in Dallas, will be the opening of the new Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. Now all the excitement reaches its climax, and The Question will be answered: what will the hall sound like? The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has taken a large gamble in trying forperfection-it deliberately made the Meyerson small, on the scale of the greatest orchestra halls in the world, in order to have a chance at getting as good a home as those the Vienna Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony enjoy.

The DSO has planned a gala round of concerts to test the mettle of the new Meyerson Center. After the grand opening of a “Tribute to Dallas” featuring violinist Isaac Stern on September 6-open to invited guests only-the hall opens to the public on September 8 with a performance by pianist Van Cliburn, who’ll make one of his first appearances in more than a decade (and, it’s rumored, net a fee of a half million dollars).

The remainder of the opening week of the Meyerson Center tests the hall with just about every imaginable sort of musical performance. Will the acoustics allow chamber musicians to be heard in all their subtlety? Mstislav Rostropovich, the world’s most distinguished wielder of the cello, will try to find out on September 11, and the Kronos Quartet, the chamber group that dresses (and attracts groupies) like rock musicians, will have a go on September 9. Will the hall allow a great voice to bloom? Soprano Leontyne Price will let us know on September 12. Will the most complex kind of music, that for chorus and soloists and mammoth orchestra, achieve the desired sonic boom? Conductor Eduardo Mata will lead singers Susan Dunn, Tatiana Troyanos, Richard Leech, and Paul Plishka with the Dallas Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in the Verdi Requiem on September 10.

Realistically, not everyone who is interested in hearing the USO in its new home is going to have a chance to attend the gala opening week performances-the hall is simply too small to hold all the curious. It is particularly nice, therefore, that the orchestra has planned such an interesting fall season in order to give others a chance to experience the Meyerson Center. There is something for everybody on the autumn roster. But the procrastinators among us may not have any opportunity at all to hear the DSO in the Meyerson Center in its first months: by the beginning of the summer, Saturday night’s regular subscription series was nearly sold out and the SuperPops series was completely gone.