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S.J.'s unlikely music spot If you've
ever been to Le Petit Trianon, the former rooming house that's now a
hot house for classical music in the South Bay, you will have seen Keith
Watt. He's the owner, standing with a flashlight outside his little
theater after every performance, saying, "Thank you for coming
to the Trianon theater, and watch your step.'' It's
the sort of personal touch that has helped turn the downtown San Jose
theater into an important cultural destination. Concert pianist Olga
Kern performed at New York's Carnegie Hall this week; she played at
Trianon in September for 380 people, a full house. Pianist Jon Nakamatsu,
performing this weekend with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony
Hall, gave a Trianon recital in January. It was a packed, in-crowd event
in San Jose's secret performance space. Set
inside a French Greek Revival mansion on a seedy stretch of North Fifth
Street, Le Petit Trianon may seem an unlikely hot spot. But audiences
and musicians increasingly relish its intimacy and sensational acoustics.
"It is the best," says conductor Barbara Day Turner, whose
San Jose Chamber Orchestra has performed there since 1991. She likens
the Trianon to a "European salon-style recital hall" where
music "envelops the audience and players." Colorful history The
hall's transformation is comical to those who know its history. Le Petit
Trianon was built as a Christian Assembly church in the 1920s. Watt
bought it (and three adjacent properties) in 1982 for $437,000, and
ran it as a rooming house. He opened it to performances in 1988, and
concertgoers grew accustomed to seeing tenants in bathrobes walking
the hallways. Day Turner remembers "the smell of bacon cooking
while conducting 'Verklarte Nach' " by Arnold Schonberg. The
hall's improvements -- and newfound prestigiousness -- are due to Watt,
a former door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and San Jose post office
clerk who started buying downtown real estate in the 1960s, and has
subsidized Trianon with the proceeds from his rental properties for
years. "I have no children. I have no grandchildren,'' says Watt,
67, who grew up in Richmond, Ind., where his father owned a casket factory.
"But my grandmother had been a concert pianist, and my mother played
a Chickering piano in our house, and so when I saw this place, I thought,
'Well, maybe we can have some music here.'" Watt
is an old-fashioned, low-profile community advocate. He is a founder
of Guadalupe River Park and Gardens, a three-mile greenscape from the
Children's Discovery Museum to San Jose International Airport slated
to open next year. Trianon, until recently, was a financial debacle,
despite -- or perhaps because of -- Watt's devotion. For years, he rented
it out to performers for little money, bought cheese platters and sodas
at Albertsons for intermissions, vacuumed the hall before concerts,
and helped park cars as patrons arrived. He "realized that some
day people will appreciate it and we'll get more business," he
says. The
place lost money for a long time, between $150,000 and $250,000 a year,
which Watt covered out of the profits from his Mother Olson's Inn, the
name of his real estate company. (The company owns 23 properties in
downtown San Jose.) The operating budget gap has been closed the past
few years, as bookings have increased and Watt has refined his business
plan. But he still pays for capital improvements out of his pocket:
a new roof, a tiled courtyard, a $103,000 Steinway D concert grand piano. His
goal is to keep strengthening the hall's finances and establish a non-profit
foundation to run the place. Essentially, "Keith's vision is to
gift it to the community as a performing arts theater," says Norval
Nelson, a friend who three years ago gave up his job as general manager
of San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel to work for Watt as vice
president of operations. Le Petit
Trianon -- named for a chateau at Versailles, outside Paris -- sits
between a church and a halfway house, half a block from where San Jose's
new City Hall is rising on Santa Clara Street. A seven-story parking
garage is planned for the empty lot directly across the street from
the theater. Suddenly, Trianon is at the center of the action. This year, Trianon will host about 1,000 events. These include the
San Jose Chamber Music Society's high-level concert series; recitals
by celebrated pianists; and scores of recitals by piano students. They
also include weddings, church services and an Iranian Comedy night.
Most bookings are made by marketer Hope Shapiro, whom Watt hired
two years ago and who is married to Nelson's stepson. Watt, Nelson and Shapiro are like mother hens overseeing the
operation, generating income from booking and by renting 20 offices—formerly
rooms for men in bathrobes—in the hallways around the concert hall. Tenants include Silicon Valley Gay Men's
Chorus, the Santa Clara County Park Rangers Association, a lingerie
saleswomen and a CPA.
Great acoustics
Watt toured a visitor through his theater last week as that night's
performers were arriving: The
Monokrome Flute Quartet, led by Santa Clara flutist Elena Yarritu.
She made her Carnegie Hall debut in November, at Carnegie's Weill
Recital Hall, but prefers the sound at Trianon.
It almost has perfect acoustics, the perfect balance of liveliness
and just enoughÉreverb," she told Watt.
"Carnegie Hall is a little bit more dead.
You sound fine, but you feel a little dry."
Watt didn't seem at all surprised by the appraisal. Trianon "has an echo in the hall," he explained to Yarritu,
"and the echo fills in behind you, so you actually sound a little
better than you are. It's
like singing in the shower."
Earlier,
Watt had claimed to be cutting back on his hours at the theater, but
when Monokroma began its program at 8 p.m., he was seated in Trianon's
tiny balcony. "I like
to catch a little of everything," he said.
"I'll stay half an hour."
The
music was beguiling, rolling like clouds through the hall. An hour later, as the concert wound down, Watts was still up
there in the balcony, a proud papa looking out over his marvelous little
theater. |