#sandiegosymphony
These two towering cultural institutions of San Diego began in different decades of the twentieth century and made their marks on the life of the City. Who could have predicted that one day, the San Diego Symphony and The Fox Theatre would become fatefully bound together for their mutual survival and success?
On December 6, 1910, the first performance was given, in the ballroom of the newly-opened US Grant hotel in downtown San Diego, by an ensemble of a couple of dozen musicians calling themselves the “San Diego Symphony,” led by a German violinist named Richard Schliewen. The program included Beethoven’s First Symphony.
This “San Diego Symphony” entity was incorporated in 1912. This version of the Symphony performed several more concerts at various San Diego venues, led by their first permanent conductor Buren Schryock, until the US entered World War I in 1917. The Symphony returned to concerts in 1919 but disbanded after a final concert at the Spreckels Theater in 1920, allowing the original incorporation to go dormant.
In 1921, Italian immigrant and composer Nino Marcelli was hired to conduct the San Diego High School orchestra, giving concerts at the high school’s Russ Auditorium. His program becomes such a phenomenal success that, responding to the performance needs of his alumni students, he founds the San Diego Philharmonic in 1927. This group was later incorporated as the “San Diego Civic Symphony Orchestra of San Diego” in 1928. With the blessing of Buren Schryock, leader of the earlier SDS, Maestro Marcelli further evolved the name of his orchestra to the “San Diego Symphony”. Despite a few “pauses” over the decades, today’s Symphony is the direct descendant of Marcelli’s, who led the Orchestra through 1937.
On November 8, 1929, the Fox Theatre, latest in a series of Fox theaters built by entrepreneur William Fox across America in the 1920s, opened in downtown San Diego at the corner of Seventh and B. Fox’s San Diego theater was designed by San Francisco architectural firm Weeks and Day. Though the opening, attended by tens of thousands of San Diegans inside and outside the theater, came at a financially fraught time for the country (just one week after the great Black Friday Crash of 1929 that would kick off the Great Depression of the 1930s), the theater was an instant success: an “A” ticket to a movie palace more spacious and luxurious than anything San Diego had ever seen. (The family of Fox’s local development partner, Philip Gildred, continues a relationship with the Symphony to this day.) The Fox remained San Diego’s most high-profile movie house for the next 40 years.
At the center of the 1935-36 California-Pacific Exposition in Balboa Park was a series of summer concerts given at the Ford Bowl (today’s abandoned Starlight Amphitheater) by the San Diego Symphony under the baton of Nino Marcelli. Several of those programs were recorded and broadcast nationally over the Columbia Broadcasting System, bring the Symphony to a national audience for the first time.
As the orchestra was at this time primarily a summer orchestra, the group was forced to go dark in 1940 when all of Balboa Park was given over to the US Navy by the City for exclusive Naval Hospital use, in anticipation of a more and more inevitable World War II. This situation persisted all the way through 1949, when new music director Fabien Sevitsky resumed summer San Diego Symphony concerts at the same venue, newly rechristened the “Balboa Park Bowl.”
In 1959, after years of planning by a later music director, the great choral master Robert Shaw, the San Diego Symphony presented its first indoor series of classical concerts, including one with renowned piano wunderkind Van Cliburn. Succeeding years and music directors established the Symphony’s indoor classical series that today’s Jacobs Masterworks is based on. Daytime rehearsals began during this time, as well as serious fundraising efforts, contributing to the evolution of the Orchestra from an amateur or semi-professional ensemble to a fully professional symphony orchestra.
The Fox Theatre maintained its stellar reputation over the decades, running movies 24 hours a day during WW2 and becoming Walt Disney’s favorite out-of-Hollywood venue for opening his famous animated films. With the cratering of the urban core in the 1950s in favor of the suburbs (a phenomenon not unique to San Diego), the Gildred family decided in 1963 to renovate the Fox movie theater into a facility that could more easily accommodate live stage productions. The family even contracted with New York’s famous Nederlander Company to present a season of eight “road show” plays a year. The Fox also was made available to function after 1965 as a second “civic theater” for the City of San Diego. Eventually, the Gildred Family sold the Fox in 1980, and for the first time in its storied history San Diego’s glittering movie palace went dark, leaving the “Fox Block” vulnerable to demolition, redevelopment, or…?
In January of 1965, the San Diego Symphony performed on the opening night spectacular of San Diego’s new Civic Theatre, led by music director Earl Bernard Murray. This began a twenty-year rental residency of the Symphony at the Civic. The orchestra achieved unprecedented artistic growth in these decades under the batons of music directors Zoltan Rozsnyai, Peter Erős and David Atherton.
However, the Civic Theatre itself quickly became a very popular downtown venue for producers, and soon the Symphony began having major difficulties scheduling rehearsals and performances around the demands of other producing entities the City was trying to accommodate.
(Meanwhile, the popular summer concerts continued, now relocated to San Diego State’s Open Air Amphitheatre as a primary venue, with occasional appearances at the Aztec Bowl.)
As the Orchestra was just barely getting by on the classical concert dates they were able to schedule at the Civic, it became clear that either the orchestra would have to downsize to smaller/multiple venues, or…?
In 1984, through determination, ingenuity, guts and a touch of luck, Symphony leadership (especially President M.B. “Det” Merryman, Executive Vice President Blaine Quick, Vice President Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs and a young Board member by the name of Dr. Warren O. Kessler) managed to place down a deposit on the up-for-sale “Fox Block”, they and subsequently negotiated a deal with Charlton Raynd Development Company which left ownership of The Fox in the hands of the San Diego Symphony. (In the wake of what was actually a quite complicated transaction, CRDC was then free to develop the rest of the block into today’s Symphony Towers and Marriott Pulse.)
The Fox Theatre, rechristened “Symphony Hall,” was renovated and restored over the course of a year to its former palace glory by lead project architects Deems/Lewis and Partners. Repainting of the interior was handled by A.T. Heinsbergen and Company of Los Angeles, the same firm that created the original Fox Theatre art 56 years before. All of the seats were replaced with a uniform set that were replicas of the 1929 seats.
On Saturday evening, November 2, 1985, San Diego was once again invited downtown for an unforgettable “re-debut” of one of San Diego’s most treasured cultural venues. The “Inaugural Concert Celebrating the Grand Opening of Symphony Hall” featured the San Diego Symphony, led by David Atherton, performing music by Bernstein, Mozart and Bizet, plus a huge helping of popular music and song. Special guests for this star-studded evening included James Galway, Diahann Carroll, Joel Grey, Hal Linden, Toni Tennille and jazz legend Oscar Peterson. The 2 ½-hour event was broadcast live, top to bottom, on KGTV Channel 10 and KFSD FM, San Diego’s classical music station.
Did the San Diego Symphony bite off more than it could chew with the purchase of Symphony Hall? It is arguable. Maintaining their own home and “making it pay” was something new for this still-lean non-profit, and the following 15 years saw an exhausting mixture of artistic advancement and financial turmoil…plus a lifeline cast from a prominent local family that changed the name of the Symphony’s home yet again.
After a management lockout for the 1986-87 season, the Symphony came back carefully and resumed concerts…just in time for the entire “Fox block” to become a construction site for Symphony Towers and the hotel. (The build was not fully completed until 1989.) An extensive conductor search, after the departure of David Atherton, concluded with the 1989 appointment of Yoav Talmi as music director. In subsequent years Talmi built on the improvements Atherton had produced in the Orchestra to take them to new musical heights and great reviews. Ticket sales and donations did not always follow suit, unfortunately.
Soon after Dr. Warren Kessler assumed the presidency of the Symphony Association, an anonymous gift of $2.5M came to the Symphony, the largest single donation they’d ever received. The donor was later revealed to be Helen Copley, Chairman of Copley Press, Inc., and publisher of both daily newspapers San Diegans could read at the time. This donation, along with some major debt forgiveness by a group of local banks, allowed the San Diego Symphony to pay off its “Fox” mortgage. The theater was now the Symphony’s, free and clear. The Copley gift was honored by renaming the Symphony’s home “Copley Symphony Hall.”
(Summer concerts, a continuing longtime mainstay of the organization, were reborn in 1983 as “Summer Pops” at Hospitality Point in Mission Bay Park, with Principal Tuba Matthew Garbutt stepping to the front and leading concerts. The summer season was becoming more and more important to the financial stability of the Symphony…but not quite soon enough.)
As “near-death” experiences go, the San Diego Symphony’s late 1990s bankruptcy was both horrifying and clarifying. The reasons this unhappy time came to pass were numerous and unfortunate, but it certainly served to demonstrate to the future Symphony Board and Administration the absolute necessity for careful planning, budgeting, marketing and fundraising. Through the efforts of too many musicians, staff members, board members, judges and local business leaders to name here, the Symphony’s excruciating Chapter 7 proceedings were allowed to convert over to Chapter 11, saving all of the assets of the Symphony, including Copley Symphony Hall and the music library. All these years later, it must be emphasized: this was a close call. One heroic individual who must be mentioned as the Symphony’s key deliverer in this dark time is businessman and developer Larry Robinson, whose $2M contribution allowed the Hall to be kept by him in escrow until a much later time (2015), when the Symphony would be allowed to buy the Hall back at a very reasonable price. (Bankruptcy proceedings are complicated, so this is admittedly a simplification of what happened, but in essence correct.) Even with this “save,” the Symphony was still dark from mid-1996 to Summer 1998, with almost all staff and most principal musicians leaving for other employment. The Board and the Admin had to be rebuilt from scratch. It took a while.
The San Diego Symphony finally returned to music-making at Navy Pier on July 24, 1998, in downtown San Diego with a “Truly Tchaikovsky” concert led by artistic director Jung-Ho Pak. In the words of the San Diego Union-Tribune, “the return concert was a triumph, an evening of delights made emotional by the central reality: the Symphony was back.” This was the first of eight programs and 18 concerts the Symphony successfully presented that summer at Navy Pier.
A few months later, on October 9, 1998, the Symphony began an indoor season of classical concerts at Copley Symphony Hall, with Pak conducting. The opening work was Jubilations, written by Principal Horn John Lorge. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s reviewer noted that the orchestra played with “a resonant conviction that earned cheers and standing ovations from a near-capacity audience. [The] season opening was a triumphant homecoming.”
On January 14, 2002, the San Diego Symphony Orchestra celebrated the announcement of the single largest donation ever made to an American Symphony Orchestra, totaling $120 million. This pledged gift was generously given by Joan and Irwin Jacobs, solidifying a sustained period of stability for the post-bankruptcy orchestra. (The lessons had been learned!) At the time of the gift, The New York Times declared the San Diego Symphony Orchestra was "placed firmly on the nation’s musical landscape" as a result of this gift. A decade later, the entire Symphony footprint of the old “Fox block” (stage, hall, lobbies, backstage, offices) was renamed the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Music Center – later simplified to the current “Jacobs Music Center”.
The San Diego Symphony announced the appointment of Jahja Ling as music director in 2003. Ling, born in Indonesia, was the first conductor of Chinese descent hired as music director by a major American Orchestra. During his tenure, Ling auditioned and hired all of the principal positions vacated following the bankruptcy, plus several other orchestral positions during his 13-year tenure. That “class” of young musicians hired over such a relatively short period (including our Concertmaster Jeff Thayer) is the remarkably solid core of the Orchestra heard today. 2004 also saw the hiring of Edward “Ward” Gill as Executive Director of the San Diego Symphony, a position he occupied longer than any previous individual. Gill’s tenure saw balanced budgets in every year of his administration and the first in a series of completed collective bargaining agreements with the Musicians Union, a much-welcomed contrast to previous decades. (Gill also oversaw the previous Jacobs Music Center renovation in 2012, creating a new musicians’ lounge, permanent lobby bars, new carpeting/tiling, and a long-requested expansion of the restroom facilities.) On December 3, 2010, Ling led a Centennial Celebration performance of the San Diego Symphony, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, at The Balboa Theatre, followed by a Centennial Gala at the US Grant – almost 100 years to the day after the San Diego Symphony’s first performance there.
The San Diego Symphony Orchestra made history on October 29, 2013, with its first appearance ever at New York's Carnegie Hall, performing a sold-out concert with pianist Lang Lang under the baton of Jahja Ling. A subsequent “China Friendship Tour” took the orchestra through a series of concert dates in Shanghai, Yantai (San Diego's "Sister City") and Beijing November 1-11.
In 2014 Martha Gilmer, a 35-year veteran of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra administration, was hired as the next CEO of the San Diego Symphony. She came to San Diego with a three-fold mission: (1) hire a new music director (2) secure a permanent site for the Symphony’s Summer concerts, and (3) improve the stage and hall acoustics of the Jacobs Music Center.
After a two-year international search, including appearances by over a dozen guest conductors, gifted, charismatic young Venezuelan conductor and El Sistema graduate Rafael Payare was appointed as the next (and current) music director for the San Diego Symphony in 2018. He began a highly successful and acclaimed debut season of concerts in October 2019, until…
On March 8, 2020, the final concert was given at the Jacobs Music Center by the San Diego Symphony before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down San Diego and the world. A heartbroken Symphony administration was forced to cancel the remainder of Payare’s debut season, along with the Summer 2020 season and the indoor 2020-21 season. Symphony musicians and a somewhat reduced staff rallied to produce a series of live, often free digital concerts, complete with “social distancing” so that our musicians and patrons could stay in touch online and support each other during a very trying time of isolation and potential serious illness.
Supported by a successful $125 capital campaign, the San Diego Symphony opened The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park on the site of the Symphony’s temporary summer home of 17 seasons after many years of planning, negotiated agreements with various governmental and environmental entities, and seemingly endless construction. The August 6, 2021, debut concert, led by Rafael Payare, was the very first post-pandemic large-scale public event San Diegans were able to experience after 18 months of complete shutdown for concert venues. From that auspicious beginning, The Rady Shell has become an international icon for San Diego, and a central element in several San Diego/California tourism campaigns to date.
The San Diego Symphony began to perform public classical concerts again at The Rady Shell in Fall of 2021. The subsequent three classical music seasons saw the Orchestra perform at multiple venues around San Diego County, including Escondido, Chula Vista, La Jolla, Del Cerro, Rancho Santa Fe and even some concerts back at San Diego Civic Theatre. A "Coast-to-Coast" tour was launched in October 2023, with stops at Soka University in Orange County and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, before a culminating concert marking the return of the San Diego Symphony to Carnegie Hall, this time under the leadership of music director Rafael Payare.
The huge success of The Rady Shell since its 2021 opening encouraged CEO Martha Gilmer and the Symphony Board to vastly expand their previous ambitions to merely “improve the acoustics of the stage and hall” at Jacobs Music Center. One silver lining of the pandemic was that it spurred the San Diego Symphony Orchestra Association to proceed with a long-intended upgrade to the Hall’s HVAC apparatus. The closed hall made it much easier to facilitate a radical shift of the old Fox HVAC footprint from the basement to high above the performance chamber, actually hanging it off of the hotel garage structure above! Once this delicate operation was nearly complete (think of building a ship in a bottle…in a pandemic!), a bold decision was taken to proceed with a wholesale, to-the-bones renovation of the performance space and backstage areas. The result of this daring dream is before you today. (Follow this link to learn more about this amazing renovation project.) The "new" Jacobs Music Center finally re-opened for public concerts on September 28, 2024.
To quote “Det” Merryman from 1985, “The acquisition of Symphony Hall is the single most significant occurrence in the history of the San Diego arts community, placing our orchestra among the ranks of only a handful of orchestras across the continent.” 40 years of triumph, struggle, growth, enforced closure and rebirth have given absolute confirmation to Merryman’s heartfelt optimism.
On behalf of the musicians and administration and Board of Directors of the San Diego Symphony, we thank you for coming into our home, and making a place in our history for yourself and your love for this magical building and this amazing orchestra.
-JD Smith, Director of Marketing and Sales Technology, San Diego Symphony
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