Music

The Sage at Gateshead is the home of musical life here in the North East of England. It has hosted concerts from a huge range of local and internationally famous artists. The building is an incredible feat of structural engineering with its awe inspiring design of curved glass and stainless steel. Sage contains three performance halls and the building was designed around these three spaces to allow for maximum attention to detail in their acoustic properties.

Structurally it is actually three separate buildings, insulated from each other to prevent noise and vibration travelling between them. These three buildings are enclosed by the now-famous glass and steel shell. Hall One was intended as an acoustically perfect space, modelled on the renowned Musikverein in Vienna. Its ceiling panels may be raised and lowered and curtains drawn across the ribbed wooden side walls, changing the sound profile of the room to suit any type of music. Hall Two is a smaller venue, possibly the world's only ten-sided performance space.The building's third concourse was designed to be used for informal music-making. Below the concourse level is the Music Education Centre, where workshops, community music courses and day-to-day instrumental teaching takes place in over 20 individual, largely sound-proofed rooms, one of which is also a recording studio.