The sound of Makhijani's violin on Friday, and on Saturday the sound of the 90-piece student orchestra tackling the unexpectedly mesmerizing sonic spectacular of Holst's The Planets, both came across with full-bodied, vivid immediacy. The hall is similar to the vibrant liveliness of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Disney Hall, a new standard in concert-hall excellence.

In fact, at the Conservatory, you don't get the sound of everything from everywhere — coughs, shuffling feet, audience whispers — that's true in Los Angeles. The sound here comes from the stage, not your surroundings.

Kirkegaard's task was made more difficult by the shape of the former ballroom, which was taller than the wished-for shoebox frame. The hall, 111 feet long by 50 feet wide, has a 44-foot high, beautifully painted ceiling at the edge of the 40-by-50-foot stage. The raked floor of seats slopes up some 7 feet in the back of the room. While those dimensions may not be ideal, architects and acousticians collaborated well: Horizontal ridges of white faux columns, pilasters, cornices, and ceiling ribbons (preserved from the original structure) combine to provide excellent sound.

It's a good thing that first impressions aren't everything. The first sound heard in the new hall was the loud, noisy percussion (reverberating from the wall behind the orchestra) of John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Conductor Alasdair Neale held nothing back, and the result was an involuntary movement to protect my ears and serious worry about what would happen when the bacchanalia of the Holst struck.

The good — no, great — news is that the first 30 seconds of the concert provided the only negative experience during the entire evening. For instead of noise, Holst's turbulent opening movement, "Mars," was musical and acoustical perfection. With violin sections playing powerfully together to lead the charge, Neale maintained excellent balance, and the hall was filled with a sound to be treasured. Subsequent quiet movements, an off-stage chorus of 40 students, fortissimos, and the "Mystic Neptune" finale all worked exceedingly well. Concertmaster David Southorn contributed fine solo passages.

Just as its lens can be judged by the best pictures that a camera captures, a concert hall's quality is determined by performances in which everything clicks and is perfectly clear. The bold gambit of offering The Planets with a student orchestra paid off superbly.

And so, problems in the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 were not to be held against the hall. Neale, who raised the Holst to such heights, didn't lead a comparable performance in the concerto. He allowed the orchestra to overwhelm the soloist repeatedly — not an easy task. The Conservatory's Keisuke Nakagoshi, a powerful pianist, played the fiendishly difficult passages with ease. Not having been given the proper balance, however, the concerto came across as if the piano were merely one of the instruments, not the reigning one.

Altogether, the new concert hall sounds, looks, and feels good. It's warmly lit and comfortable, yet it imparts a sense of being part of an "occasion." True, it has some peculiar aspects to it. There are only small, easy-to-overlook side doors (on three levels, all leading to the same space), and no main entrance at all. Audience-handling logistics are poor, since there's no clear path between the street entrance and the hall. And, against the dramatic, three-story-high atrium, the actual floor space at the box office and leading into the auditorium is more inadequate and chaotic than even the infamous elbow-combat venue of Davies Symphony Hall's narrow lobbies.

Good in major ways, even though it's experiencing minor problems in its shakeout phase, the concert hall is significant in being the final, crowning touch in the Conservatory's $80-million move from the Sunset District to the Civic Center.

Already graced with a City Hall retrofitted to sit on rollers, the better to bounce about in the next quake, San Francisco now has a music complex filled with metal springs to counteract sound vibrations. The building, at 50 Oak Street, built by San Francisco's own SMWM architectural firm, has hundreds of cylindrical metal devices embedded in the walls, with heavy springs to pull against the vibration caused by sound. Kirkegaard Associates used these spring mounts to ensure isolation between halls and practice rooms, which are fairly piled on top of one another.

The Conservatory complex now completes the city's performing arts center, close to Davies Symphony Hall, the War Memorial Opera House, the San Francisco Ballet School, the Herbst and Orpheum theaters, and the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

Additional facilities in the new Conservatory building include the 120-seat Osher Salon, a 140-seat recital hall, the Kimball Green Room for artists preparing for a performance, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Student Lounge, the Phyllis Wattis Atrium, the Milton Salkind Terrace, 44 studios, 14 classrooms, 33 practice rooms, a 6,500-square foot music library, a percussion suite, a keyboard lab, recording and electronic music studios, and academic and administrative offices, not to mention a panoply of no fewer than 100 Steinway and Yamaha pianos.

Altogether, the facilities will offer more than 300 concerts and recitals annually, most of them free music events given by students and faculty. The school itself is expected to grow well beyond the Sunset census of 314 students in the collegiate and 430 in the preparatory divisions, plus about 400 adults taking extension classes. Recent student bodies included representatives of 21 countries and 31 states; the national and international publicity generated by the new building is likely to increase both figures.

(Janos Gereben is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)

©2006 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved