The Bangor Symphony Orchestra is exploring holding new, larger performances in the Cross Insurance Center in the coming years with help from the city’s pandemic recovery funding.
While the Cross Insurance Center is large enough to host the entire 40- to 65-person symphony orchestra with plenty of audience seating, it’s also too cavernous for the group acoustically, said Renia Shterenberg, executive director of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra.
The group wants to use federal pandemic recovery funding from the city to make the space more suitable for symphony orchestra performances. This could mean installing new lighting and acoustic equipment “that we need so our sound doesn’t go straight up,” Shterenberg said.
“We don’t want to compromise the quality of the sound in any space we perform,” said Berney Kubetz, Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s president. “We also want to make sure using a bigger space makes sense and is a financially viable option.”
The Bangor City Council on Monday gave the symphony orchestra informal approval to use $40,000 in federal pandemic recovery funding to help outfit the Cross Insurance Center to make the space suitable for large performances.
Councilors will likely formally approve the request in meetings next month. The decision will merely adjust what the symphony orchestra can use a chunk of pandemic relief funds for. The money comes from the more than $20 million the city received after Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021.
The symphony orchestra now performs in the Collins Center for the Arts at the University of Maine’s Orono campus and isn’t intending to leave the space entirely, Shterenberg said.
Any performances the orchestra offers in the Cross Insurance Center would be used to supplement what it offers in the Collins Center, but this likely won’t happen until 2026, Kubetz said.
“We don’t envision moving our classical masterworks performances out of the Collins Center,” Kubetz said. “It would be something more innovative than our standard classical agenda.”
The search for alternative Bangor-based performance venues began after the Bangor Arts Exchange, jointly run by the symphony orchestra and local arts nonprofit Launchpad, announced last month that it would be closing its doors for good.
The news came in tandem with the abrupt closure of another small downtown Bangor arts venue, the Queen City Cinema Club, which sent local musicians and artists searching for new places to perform within the city.
The Bangor Arts Exchange’s upstairs ballroom space could previously host portions of the symphony orchestra, such as a string quartet, but was too small to hold the full orchestra, Kubetz said.
The orchestra initially turned its attention to a small space on Exchange Street next to the Bangor Arts Exchange, and Bangor city councilors gave $40,000 in federal pandemic recovery funding to turn a space into a suitable performance venue. That funding could cover purchasing equipment for the space, such as staging, lighting, chairs and more.
However, the symphony orchestra decided not to pursue performances in the smaller space, Kubetz said, so is instead looking to use the pandemic relief money to outfit the Cross Insurance Center with performance equipment.
