Crowd Pleaser

Photo Steven Evans/Diamond and Schmitt Architect Inc/Canadian Opera Company.

Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

Opened: June 14, 2006
Seats: 2,043
Tiers: Five
Architect: Jack Diamond, Diamond + Schmitt
Style: Kind, gentle modernism
Prime movers: Canadian Opera Company head Richard Bradshaw; former Ontario premier Ernie Eves; hotelier Izzy Sharpe; late lawyer R. Fraser Elliott
Features: Longest unsupported glass staircase ever built; space above the stage for surtitles, an innovation pioneered by the Canadian Opera Company and widely exported; a subterranean storey filled with sound-absorbing pads to stop subway noise from filtering upward.
Opening-night fare: Sadly, no Canadian composers. Performers led by Ben Heppner and Adrianne Pieczonka take a whistle-stop tour of the major opera-producing nations, including Austria (Mozart), France (Délibes), Germany (Wagner), Italy (Rossini, Verdi) and Russia (Tchaikovsky).
Miscellaneous details: Some of the little extras include a backstage machine to dry wigs and individually heated seats. Three glass stairs in the opulent staircase blew up, but otherwise the project was completed in a comparatively short three years and on budget, at a bargain-basement price of $150 million.
In a nutshell: The rectilinear, severe, pinstriped-grey-suit exterior belies a warm, sensuous womb of a concert hall within.

Photo Getty Images.

New National Theatre, Tokyo

Opened: 1997
Seats: 1,810
Tiers: Four
Architect: Takahiko Yanagisawa
Style: International modernism
Prime movers: A number of corporate donors who formed and funded the Tokyo City Cultural Foundation to plan and manage the site.
Features: A glass mosaic, without Japanese motifs, dominates the foyer; spare, unadorned plywood walls enclose the shoebox-shaped concert hall. The whole complex covers 4.5 hectares, including a retail galleria and a 54-storey skyscraper, which houses the opera company’s administrators.
Opening-night fare: Ikuma Dan’s Takeru
Miscellaneous details: Japan’s prime minister, as well as the country’s Emperor and Empress, attended the gala opening.
In a nutshell: This bland edifice is really an annex to a shopping mall and could have been plopped down anywhere.

Photo Voitto Niemelä/Finnish National Opera.

Suomen Kansallisooppera, Helsinki, Finland

Opened: 1994
Seats: 1,385
Tiers: Four
Architects: Eero Hyvämäki, Jukka Karhunen, Risto Parkkinen
Style: Homage to Bauhaus
Prime movers: The municipality of Helsinki, Finnish architectural lion Alvar Aalto
Features: A glass curtain wall dominates the façade, which may have inspired the similarly sunroom-like front of the Four Seasons Centre; square windows and tiles are a repeating design element throughout.
Opening-night fare: Aulis Sallinen’s Kullervo
Miscellaneous details: Only Finns were eligible to design the house, which took 12 years to build and cost the equivalent of $250 million.
In a nutshell: The water’s edge site adds drama to this otherwise conventional hall.

Photo Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images.

Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, Sydney, Australia

Opened: 1973
Seats: 2,679
Tiers: Three
Architects: Jorn Utzon (1959-1966), replaced by E.H. Farmer, Peter Hall, Lionel Todd and David Littlemore (1966-1973)
Style: Unique in its time, it opened the door for the exuberant likes of Frank Gehry.
Prime mover: New South Wales premier Joe Cahill. Hardly an opera buff, this Labor politician and former railroad worker preferred such populist pieces as The Donkey Serenade.
Features: A world-famous profile that resembles ship sails, a stegosaurus or — as local cynics contend — two turtles mating, this building houses a concert hall that was once rated 98th out of 100 international venues in acoustical quality; as in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, some audience members sit behind the stage, under the largest tracker organ in the world.
Opening-night fare: Prokofiev’s War and Peace
Miscellaneous details: After seven years on the job, the Danish architect Jorn Utzon was fired for going wildly over budget and past deadline; he was supplanted by less dreamy local architects and refused to attend the building’s grand opening — which occurred almost 15 years after construction began.
In a nutshell: One of modern architecture’s great icons creates maximum drama by the Sydney Harbour, but doesn’t house an adequate performance space.

Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera House, New York City

Opened: 1966
Seats: 3,816
Tiers: Five
Architect: Wallace Harrison
Prime mover: John Davison Rockefeller Jr.
Style: A modernist take on the arcaded Greek temple
Features: Marc Chagall murals bedeck the lobby while in the auditorium massive crystal chandeliers — gifts from the Austrian government — are raised out of sight before every performance.
Opening-night fare: Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra starring Leontyne Price
Miscellaneous details: In Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, the Met provides the backdrop for Nicolas Cage’s romance with Cher; it’s also where Cher’s on-screen father canoodles with his mistress.
In a nutshell: Featuring a stage and hall that are almost twice as big as those in the Four Seasons Centre, this behemoth is situated on a fountain-focused piazza and lights up like a lantern at night — two of the many reasons the Met lends a greater sense of occasion to an evening than any other modern hall.

Photo courtesy of San Francisco Opera.

War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco

Opened: 1932
Seats: 3,176
Tiers: Four
Architects: Arthur Brown, G. Albert Lansburgh, Willis Polk
Style: Beaux-Arts
Prime movers: Impresario Gaetano Merolo, the City of San Francisco and well-to-do WWI veterans
Features: Doric columns adorn an otherwise plain exterior; inside, a gold brocade stage curtain (that weighs a tonne) picks up on the copious gilding throughout the hall; red velvet seats enhance the luxurious feel, as do bodacious sculptures of amazons above the proscenium.
Opening-night fare: Puccini’s Tosca
Miscellaneous details: Both the United Nations Charter and the International Declaration of Human Rights were signed on the premises; in the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gere flies Julia Roberts from Los Angeles to San Francisco on his private jet so she can take in an opera; a $50 million retrofit was required to make the building safe after the 1989 earthquake.
In a nutshell: A radical departure from the pre-war European aesthetic, which views excessive ornamentation as vulgar.

Photo Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.

Palais Garnier, Paris

Opened: 1875
Seats: 1,979
Tiers: Six
Architect: Charles Garnier
Style: Every which way — baroque, rococo, neoclassical, second empire — and loose
Prime movers: Napoleon III, Empress Eugenie, Baron Haussmann
Features: Ten types of marble and six varieties of limestone were quarried from Europe and Africa for the exterior; more than a dozen artists collaborated on the sumptuous murals; gilded putti and nymphs abound in the scarlet-upholstered concert hall
Opening-night fare: Jacques Halevy’s La Juive, Jakob Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots
Miscellaneous details: Construction took 15 years, and was delayed by a flood and an insurrection, during which the rebel Communards used the nearly completed structure as a prison; it was this opera house that the phantom haunted in Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel of that name; Marthe Chenal sang La Marseillaise on the steps of the Palais to celebrate her nation’s survival of the First World War.
In a nutshell: As frou-frou as a wedding cake, it reflects Italian and French opera’s more-more-more aesthetic.

Photo Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

Staatsoper, Vienna

Opened: 1869
Seats: 2,276
Tiers: Six
Architect: Eduard van der Nüll, August Siccard von Siccardsburg
Style: Neo-renaissance
Prime mover: Emperor Franz Joseph
Features: A suave and streamlined red-velvet-and-gilt interior; according to the world’s leading acoustics expert, its sound is “not very live”
Opening-night fare: Mozart’s Don Giovanni
Miscellaneous details: The architects were so displeased with alterations to their plans that one refused to attend the opening-night performance and the other committed suicide; Allied bombs greatly damaged the hall in the Second World War, requiring extensive rebuilding.
In a nutshell: A classic — and classy — reflection of the premium the Austro-Germanic operatic tradition placed on civility, intellect and control.

AP Photo/Bridget Jones.

Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London

Opened: 1858
Seats: 2,174
Tiers: Five
Architect: E.M. Barry
Style: Neoclassical
Prime movers: Duke of Bedford, merchant Frederick Gye
Features: A Corinthian portico and iron-and-glass bar appear up front (a look that’s mimicked and modernized by the Four Seasons Centre’s glass-facaded City Room); a Wedgwood-style medallion of a young Queen Victoria presides over the concert hall, which although gilded, is as restrained as the Palais Garnier is ebullient.
Opening-night fare: Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots
Miscellaneous details: Served as a dancehall during WWII; a renovation costing the equivalent of $400 million was completed in 1999; Tony Blair’s Labour Government once demanded the company lower ticket prices to enable the hoi polloi to attend — the company refused.
In a nutshell: As refined — and somehow prissy — as the queen during whose reign it was built.

Photo Giuseppe Cacace/Getty Images.

Teatro Alla Scala, Milan

Opened: 1778
Seats: 2,800
Tiers: Seven
Architect: Giuseppe Piermarini
Style: Palladian
Prime mover: Austrian Empress Maria-Theresa
Features: Gold-lined royal box glitters in the centre of the theatre; leading conductors have rated the acoustics the second-best in the world (after Argentina’s Teatro Colon).
Opening-night fare: Salieri’s L’Europa Riconosciuta
Miscellaneous details: After attending a performance here, the French writer Stendhal once wrote: “I’m forever condemned to be disgusted with our [French] theatres;” an $80-million renovation was completed in 2004.
In a nutshell: Like its most famous diva, Maria Callas, La Scala is little on the outside — at least compared to the Met or the Palais Garnier — but packs an aesthetic and acoustic punch.