Toronto Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | ?m | 5s | COC | Diamond Schmitt

I was watching an episode of Rewind on CP24 a few nights ago and they had a very apropos story from May 7, 1985 about Toronto's need for a new opera house (the one planned for Bay & Wellesley) so that it could more readily achieve world-class status. I can't say I've ever been more amused by 10 seconds of old news footage.
 
Lotfi came so close, all those years ago ...

But I think the wait was worth it, since it has provided us with a modest and dignified building, one more appropriate to Toronto than the bloated Safdie design.

Patrons who have had their visual palate cleansed by the calming minimalism of the neutral grey toned exterior of the building, will be set on fire by the drama on stage.
 
The window blinds looked cool this afternoon as the breeze rippled across them...
 
I can report, though not confirm from first hand experience, that from the highest row(s) in Ring 5 you may not be able to see the surtitles, "because of the way the ceiling swoops downward."

Based on the evidence of TheAlmightyFuzz's photographs, wyliepoon points out the steepness of the seating in Ring 5. Your toes will be level with the top of the seatbacks of the row in front.

By contrast, when I was in the balcony at Roy Thomson Hall last night ( Shosty's 10th, and First Violin Concerto! ) I noticed that my knees were slightly above the top of the seatbacks of the row in front of me.

The raking of the seats feels pretty steep at Roy Thomson. It will be something else at the Four Seasons.
 
Check out the last pic please
Are the metallic joints that protrude between the windows be covered up - They are both on the Queen and University side and make the glass look very unfinished
 
The City Room is finished. The Hall is finished. The Capital Campaign donor open house is tomorrow and Sunday.

I can't imagine they're saving work on the metal joints on the windows for an encore.
 
Four Seasons Centre: Star on the Opera House

Today's GTA section in the Star is completely devoted to the new Opera House. Piece by Martin Knelman:

Toronto's Opera Mania
After decades of uncertainty and false starts, the curtain's about to rise. Martin Knelman gives us an inside look at the final stages
Jun. 2, 2006. 01:00 AM
MARTIN KNELMAN

Just 11 days from today, Toronto's one and only opera house — the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts at the corner of University Ave. and Queen St. W. — will open with a gala concert.

After the singing stops, there will be a fundraising dinner on stage for those who paid $2,000 a seat. The event, sponsored by BMO, will raise $1 million for the Canadian Opera Company, which needs every penny it can raise to pay for its classy new digs.

June 14, 2006, is a day this city's cultural visionaries have been looking forward to for so long — a quarter century — that it's hard to believe it is actually upon us, especially since Toronto had come to be known all over the world as the city that couldn't get its opera house built.

Even now, it wouldn't be happening without the phenomenal personal crusade of Richard Bradshaw, the opera company's unstoppable 62-year-old general director.

This week, Bradshaw returned from a desperately needed European vacation looking more relaxed, rested and mellow than he has in a long time.

Radiating confidence, he remarked: "Now, at last, I can go back to what I love to do, conducting, without having to focus on raising money for a building. But as a conductor, I had a passionate interest in building the opera house of our dreams where the acoustics would be perfect and the orchestra pit would be fabulous. And I think that is what we've achieved."

With most of his fundraising burden out of the way, Bradshaw has been liberated to focus on making music. He will be in the pit on June 14 while members of his family occupy his box at the new opera house.

The concert will be just 90 minutes long, in marked contrast to the Metropolitan Opera's gala two weeks ago bidding farewell to long-time general manager Joseph Volpe. A dazzling all-star affair, the Met's concert went on for 5 1/2 hours.

One of the stars of the Met gala — Ben Heppner — will be a major presence at the Four Seasons gala. Heppner will also appear a few nights later as a guest of the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall.

At the post-concert dinner, Bradshaw will be presiding over an eclectic group of friends at his table. His guests: embattled tycoon Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel; writers Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson; Massey College master John Fraser and Elizabeth MacCallum; and Margaret MacMillan, the celebrated U of T historian.

Let's hope Atwood is not seated next to Black and Amiel. Remember Atwood's comic novel The Robber Bride? The villain was a character with a striking resemblance to Amiel. And it's hard to imagine any political subject the novelist and the fallen press baron could agree on.

But perhaps they might agree that among the heroes who should be feted on this night to remember are those who gave millions to make sure Toronto at long last got its opera house.

At the top of the list are Isadore Sharp, president of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, whose company put up $20 million for naming rights. He will be present, along with his wife, Rosalie Wise Sharp.

Sadly, one of the company's greatest patrons, R. Fraser Elliott, who gave $10 million, will not be present. He lived long enough to attend the groundbreaking, but not long enough to be at the opening of the auditorium named after him.

Other members of the million-dollar club include:

Hal Jackman

Joey and Toby Tanenbaum

Leslie and Anna Dan

the Rotman family

Tony and Anne Arnell

John and Claudine Bailey

Gerard and Earlaine Collins

Peter and Shelagh Godsoe

Arthur and Sonia Labatt

Roger D. Moore

Jack Diamond's building is the kind that has to be experienced from the inside out rather than the other way around. Because of the attention to technical detail and complex teamwork that went into the acoustics and sightlines, Diamond and Bradshaw are confident Toronto will have one of the world's best places for an audience to experience opera.

But if you are less than dazzled by the exterior on the south side, which presents a long wall of black brick punctuated by small windows, there's a $500,000 solution. That is the price of the glass canopy Diamond designed to run along the entire Richmond St. side of the building over the sidewalk. This elegant finishing detail was eliminated to keep the project within its $150 million budget.

Another Diamond touch that was chopped because it saved $1 million — a roof garden entertaining space offering vistas of the entire city. But if the right benefactor comes along, it might be possible to add this touch of class later.

Meanwhile Diamond is relieved because a worrisome problem has been solved. His cascading glass staircase, providing the wow factor in his showcase City Room, was invisible behind tarp and scaffolding when the first concerts were presented in late April. The reason: because of a problem with the bolts, the staircase had failed a stress test, and were considered unsafe to use.

Now the bolts have been replaced, and the staircase has passed its stress test. And on June 14, opening gala ticket-holders will be free to skip the elevator and use this more elegant way of proceeding from one level to another.

The curtain may be going up, but the COC is not quite ready to show us the money.

With just days to go before the gala, the project is still almost $15 million short of its funding target.

Best recent news: In March the Ontario government unilaterally gave its $49 million half of the $98 million in top-up funding requested by the so-called Gang of Six — Toronto arts institutions with current building projects. That translated into $10 million for the opera house from the Queen's Park coffers, in addition to the 2002 gift of the site (valued at $31 million).

Worst recent news: Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Heritage Minister Bev Oda are in no hurry to say yes to their half of the top-up funding, which would be on top of the $25 million infrastructure cash Ottawa donated in 2002 as part of the SuperBuild bonanza (under which $230 million of government money went to Toronto arts building projects). There could be a long wait, and the answer could be no.

Hopeful Sign: A certain flurry of extra giving was precipitated by a break for donors announced in last month's federal budget. Flaherty eliminated capital gains tax on charitable gifts made in the form of shares.

To help set an example, Donald K. Johnson — the former chair of Nesbitt Burns who crusaded for this change in the tax law — increased his own pledge to the opera house from $100,000 to $250,000. Other opera benefactors have begun to follow his lead. But the opera company needs to get the message out to all its supporters that there is now a good incentive for them to increase their gifts.

Surprisingly, no one has yet scooped up the most attractive naming opportunity — the spectacular City Room. The price tag: a very reasonable $10 million. A few months ago rumours were circulating among Galen and Hilary Weston's acquaintances that the Westons — who have Canada's second largest fortune — had toured the house and were keen to put their name on the City Room.

But more recently, their excitement appears to have cooled. Since Weston said several years ago he intended to contribute to all Toronto's cultural projects, the question now is: What numbers will be on the cheque he writes for the opera?

Let's hope the number has a minimum of seven figures.

Besides the big gala, the opera company has two more concerts scheduled for opening week — one on Friday, June 16 and another on Saturday, June 17.

The National Ballet of Canada, by contrast, is having only one opening gala. That's on Thursday, June 22. Having decided years ago that it could not afford to be a partner in raising the money to build the house, the ballet company finds itself now in the position of being a tenant, paying $1 million a year in rent and obliged to go through stressful negotiations with its landlord, the opera company.

The upshot: Four years after deciding to leave the Hummingbird and move to the Four Seasons, the ballet company and the opera company have not signed an occupancy agreement.

Their respective lawyers are still duelling over obscure clauses of the long and complicated document.

The fact is that as the proud owners of a new opera house, the COC is not only in the real-estate business but also the parking business.

Preliminary budgets for the house included an eight-figure endowment fund. But consultants explained the company would enjoy a better return if it put the endowment money into building underground parking. So there are now 200 spaces. And if you want to contribute to the opera company, you should park there often — preferably while warbling an aria.

mknelman@thestar.ca

Operatics
Cost: $181 million, plus land from Ontario valued at $31 million

Principal architect: A.J. (Jack) Diamond

Seats: 2,000

Wheelchair locations: 46

Washroom stalls: 100 (two-thirds for women)

Stage width: 15.85 metres Distance: Centre stage to last row (Ring 5) — 37.18 metres

Construction

8,250 truck loads of excavated soil were removed — equal to digging 600. backyard swimming pools
489 isolation pads installed to reduce sound vibration in the auditorium
15,329 square metres of formwork used during construction — enough lumber to frame 600 homes.
8,000 cubic metres of concrete poured — enough for a sidewalk from the Four Seasons Centre to Horseshoe Falls in Niagara.
1,050 tonnes of steel.
If all the electrical wire were laid end to end it would stretch to the Buffalo Sabres HSBC Arena.
Total Area: 35,716 m2.

Source: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts ww.fourseasonscentre.ca

Compiled by Deborah Wingate and Andrea Hall

Toronto opera buildings
Where: Temperance St.; Front St.

When: 1948

There was opera in Toronto before 1848, but it was largely confined to churches, taverns and even stables. Things changed dramatically in 1848, when the city got not one but two new opera halls.

That year, John Ritchey opened the Royal Lyceum, the city's largest entertainment hall, with an orchestra pit, balcony, footlights and dressing rooms, on Front St. near Bay.

Also that year, wealthy tanner, Reform politician and philanthropist Jesse Ketchum opened his new opera hall one block north of Adelaide off Yonge St. Ketchum donated land and building with one condition — alcohol could never be sold on its street. Not surprisingly, the site became known as Temperance St. But the booze ban is gone.

At the Lyceum, acts like Sarah Bernhardt, Irish comedian and dramatist John Brougham and touring Italian opera stars thrilled audiences where the cow pasture sculptures of the TD Centre stand today.

AoD
 
Piece on acoustics of the house:

Creating the sounds of silence
Acoustical mastermind Robert Essert lives and works in the rarified air where music and pure science meet
Jun. 3, 2006. 01:00 AM
JOHN TERAUDS
CLASSICAL MUSIC WRITER

With no apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, what matters most at Toronto's new opera house is the sound of silence.

It may seem ironic that the absence of sound would matter to people committed to bringing grand opera to life. But according to Robert Essert, the acoustical mastermind behind the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, without good silence first, there's no way you're going to have a good listening experience later.

With his boyish face, trim physique and short salt-and-pepper hair, Essert does not come across as a science geek. But after a few minutes spent with the mastermind behind the acoustics of several new performance venues around the world — including the Toronto Centre for the Arts and the redesign of Roy Thomson Hall — you know Essert lives and works in the rarefied air where music and pure science meet.

During the past two months, as the Canadian Opera Company orchestra and singers have made music in the new 2,000-seat auditorium, Essert and his co-workers from Sound Space Design have been working with the architects and general contractor to fine-tune the building — from turning on the air conditioning, to flushing toilets, to opening and closing the auditorium doors.

Their goal is to give audiences the best-possible sound experience when the building is officially opened this month.

But it all started with silence.

Look up at the Four Seasons Centre from the corner of Queen St. W. and University Ave. What you see is a shell, holding the lobbies, reception and rehearsal rooms, washrooms and a parking garage.

The auditorium and stage are, literally, a separate building, cocooned inside this shell.

The hall is bunkered within its own concrete walls placed atop hundreds of large rubber blocks. Once its thick doors are closed, the sounds (and vibrations) of the city — subway, streetcars, trucks, airplanes and helicopters — simply disappear.

With no outside interference, the acoustician could focus on making the music sound as beautiful as possible.

Referring to the process of bringing the opera house to life, opera company general director Richard Bradshaw says emphatically: "In every decision we've had to make, Rob (Essert) has been pre-eminent."

The structure-within-a-structure design cost the opera corporation an extra $6 million, "but it was totally worth it for the silence," says Bradshaw.

Essert worked with Bradshaw and architect Jack Diamond from the very beginning of the project. Since Essert had worked on the stillborn opera house at Bay and Wellesley Sts. in the late 1980s, he already knew what the opera company and its main tenant, the National Ballet of Canada, would need from a new performance space.

Essert plays the classical guitar and holds a music degree, along with two engineering degrees, so he has artistic as well as scientific savvy.

This helped shape a classic, tall European horseshoe-shaped hall ringed with shallow balconies clad in undulating hard stucco. The ceiling is made up of a complex interlocking convex hard-plaster surfaces.

"The aim was to focus the sound towards the front of the house," says Essert. Since the perimeter walls are designed to "bounce" the music back into the auditorium, having more rows in the balconies would have swallowed up too much sound.

The orchestra pit comes in two sections. The main portion sits exposed to the auditorium and can be raised and lowered, depending on the type of music being played. For a big orchestra, such as needed to perform Richard Wagner's monumental Ring Cycle, the pit is lowered, and the musicians spill over into the extra pit space, which sits under the leading edge of the stage.

Allowing the instruments to be raised or lowered also helps the conductor find the right balance with the voices for each production. It's a degree of fine-tuning that few other concert spaces in the world possess.

"We didn't want to build a compromise," says Bradshaw of the flexible orchestra arrangements.

The same holds true for the hard-maple flooring and the noiseless (and draft-free) ventilation ducts situated under many of the auditorium's seats.

It's all in the service of the gods of music. Meanwhile, Essert and his team have been there to make sure that no devilish details remain overlooked.

AoD
 
And a piece on the relationship between an Opera House and the city.

Think heart — and soul
Look at the locations of most major houses and you will find them where the civic action is. They are points of local pride
Jun. 3, 2006. 01:00 AM
WILLIAM LITTLER

Critics called it the white monster; admirers, the "other" Taj Mahal. An opera about its construction bore the title The Eighth Wonder; the government supporting its construction fell.

All this fuss about an opera house? Well, not just any opera house. For as history would prove, no other building of the 20th century exerted a more transformative influence on the image of its city and country than the Sydney Opera House in faraway Australia.

When the jury picked Joern Utzon's design from 233 submissions, no one other than the Danish architect himself felt completely confident the unique structure could be built.

Indeed, it almost wasn't. Construction took 14 years, the final cost turned out to be a gulp-worthy 14 times the original estimate and when Utzon, frustrated by government interference, walked off the job, a team of four Australian architects had to finish his project for him.

Today, 33 years later, although functional problems with the house persist, none of this really seems to matter. The sheer beauty of the building, the way it sits on Bennelong Point like a cluster of concrete sails jutting into Sydney Harbour, disarms criticism.

Of the dozens of opera houses around the world that I've visited before and since on behalf of the Toronto Star, I've encountered none with a more breathtaking setting or exterior design. As Moffat Oxenbould of the Australian Opera wittily observed during one of my visits, "We have the best opera house in the world in Australia. The roof is in Sydney and the rest is in Melbourne."

Rivalry among the Australian states being what it is, Melbourne's Victorian Arts Centre aspired to give to the State of Victoria the kind of iconic building Joern Utzon had designed for New South Wales, perching a kind of Eiffel Tower on its roof to do so.

But like Toronto's new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, the Victorian Arts Centre had to fit onto a restricted downtown site, and although functionally far superior to its sister structure in Sydney, has never achieved comparable iconic status.

Like those who chose Bennelong Point, builders of the great opera houses of the past understood the importance of finding the right site to give their buildings symbolic power. The great Semper Opera House in Dresden, Germany fronts one of the handsomest public squares in Europe. The old Paris Opera stands at the head of the grand avenue bearing its name.

These are buildings meant to impress. The Paris Opera, popularly known as the Palais Garnier after its architect, Charles Garnier, was constructed to the greater glory of Napoleon III.

Thanks to the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III's glory proved to be of short duration, but his opera house, for all its practical limitations, has given Paris one of its enduring architectural symbols.

The need for a new venue to accommodate modern productions and a growing public led to the Socialist president François Mitterand's decision to complement the old house with a "people's opera house," more democratic in style than the grandiose palace at the head of the Avenue de l'Opéra. And what better place to build it than the launch site of the people's 18th century revolution, the Place de la Bastille?

A virtually unknown Toronto architect named Carlos Ott won the blindfolded design competition for what is known as the Bastille Opera and fulfilled his mandate only too well. While Joern Utzon gave Sydney a triumph of form over function, Ott gave Paris a triumph of function over form, producing a building graced with all the latest technological advances and little of the glamour associated with the art form it was meant to serve.

Born in an age of aristocracy, opera has unfairly been characterized as an art form for the elite.

Early opera house design actually took the ultra-democratic Greek amphitheatre form as its model and at various times and places during its history, going to the opera has been like going to the movies.

Look at the locations of most of the major opera houses and you will find them where the civic action is.

They are points of local pride.

They are also places of civic renewal. When, in the 1960s, it came time to construct a new Metropolitan Opera House, the site chosen lay on Manhattan's Upper West Side in what had become a depressed neighbourhood. The Met and its companion venues at Lincoln Centre effectively transformed that neighbourhood, shifting the city's centre of cultural gravity northward.

As a gesture of user-friendliness, some opera houses have tried to connect more intimately with the street life of their cities. Even the monumental Vienna State Opera has main floor retail space now and some sister houses have invited shoppers into their restaurants for lunch.

All the same, an opera house is not a shopping centre; it is a place of cultural celebration, and as basic a feature of European cityscapes as City Hall.

Even Communist China has come to understand this.

One of the handsomest, best-sited buildings in modern Shanghai is the Grand Theatre and the new opera house I visited under construction in Beijing last year promises to rival it in every way.

It is said that every city needs a heart. Opera houses, the best of them, can also help give cities a soul.

AoD
 
I passed by tonight. The city room looked beautiful all clean and lit up.

Unfortunately, I can't say that about the rest. I heard an unbiased opinion from a regular Torontonian: I went out on a date with a new girl and we passed by the 4SC. She made a comment on how she was disappointed that they didn't make the exterior look much better.

She said it was a lost opportunity. Hearing those words from a person who doesn't dwell on these issues day in and out is telling a lot. Regular Torontonians do not like the 4SC and it will take perhaps some rejigging of the exterior to get our city to warm up to this new building.

It doesn't matter what the interior is like. Passersby on the street don't see that and nobody is there to tell them that the interior is beautiful and the acoustics are world class. The way a building relates to pedestrians and the way it relates to the buildings around it and the views of it from within them is undeniably an important factor.

Jack Diamond failed in realizing that. Pitty.
 
It's always interesting to hear the opinions of people who don't think about architecture much. I've spoke with a few people about this and they seem to like the glassy city room facing University but the rest of the building gets low marks. I pretty much agree.
 
Most people also hate the use of black in large amounts. If you were to ask most folks who do not have the love design and arch. their opinion on the TD towers I am positive you would get a lot of negative remarks. "I like them but they are so dark. Why didn't they make them white?"

I personally love the black brick. I do think there is too much exposed on the side of Richmond but I think that designing something around it was mentioned above as a budget killer. If I win the big one I will approach Mr. Diamond to bring it back.
 
The building is nearly finished and there's not much that can be done to warm people up to it's (lack of) esthetic.

I'm guessing that the trees to be planted along Queen will add some colour and personality to that façade, but the incredible fact that they've left plenty of flaws in the brickwork is unbelievable.

Walk around the house and you'll notice protruding bricks, uneven laying, missing filling between bricks ... ugh.
 
Passersby who see the place in the evening (generally) when shows are gathering, or during intermissions, or when the shows are letting out, are going to see how magical that City Room is when filled with people. Even without people inside the warm glow of the wood and the soaring angles are going to attract the eye of many from outside.

Whether poeple go to the opera or ballet or not has little to do with the exterior of the building: a newspaper ad telling them that some show they have always wanted to see is coming up, is what is going to get people in there. The Opera Company and the Ballet subscribers have been eagerly anticipating the new building, and from the reactions we saw yesterday, there does not seem to be disappointment with the place; there is palable delight with the building in fact. It is not going to be a problem filling seats here.

Finally, if the acoustics are as good in the auditorium as initial reports have indicated, the people who care about that are the ones who are going to snap up tickets no matter how they feel about the exterior.

Predictions of rejection of the place by the majority of citizens are premature. Subscribers already fill the vast majority of seats, and they are going to love the place.

42
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top