Casa da Música

Overview

The Casa da Música is Porto’s concert hall, a tilted white polyhedron by Rem Koolhaas on the Boavista roundabout, opened in April 2005 as the legacy of the city’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2001 and the first building in Portugal designed from the start solely for music. The New York Times called it the most attractive project Koolhaas had built and one of the most important concert halls of the last hundred years.

It is worth a visit for the building itself, on a daily guided tour that walks through the halls and the odd rooms between them, and better still for a concert: the main auditorium is the only concert hall in the world with two walls made entirely of glass, so daylight and the city come in behind the orchestra.

Visiting

The building is a nine-storey asymmetric polyhedron of white concrete cut by huge flat and rippled windows, set back on a plaza of yellow-brown marble that skateboarders have adopted, and reached by a front stairway; from the outside it reads as a ship’s hull beached at low tide against the neoclassical avenues around it.

Guided tours in English run daily, at 10:00, 11:00, 16:00 and 17:00 from June to September and at 11:00 and 16:00 the rest of the year, for €10 and about an hour; the building is open from 09:30 to 18:00. The tour reaches the Sala Suggia, the main hall named for the Porto cellist Guilhermina Suggia, 1,238 seats between the two glass walls with gold-leaf woodgrain panels and adjustable acoustics, and Sala 2, clad in red-dipped perforated plywood with gilded chairs like an Italian opera house, a flat-floored room that holds 270 seated or 650 standing. The resident groups, the Porto Symphony Orchestra, the Remix Ensemble for contemporary music, a Baroque orchestra on period instruments and two choirs, give a programme most nights, and the hall also hosts jazz, world music and club nights.

History

The Ministry of Culture announced the project on 1 September 1998 for Porto’s Capital of Culture year. An international competition in 1999 was won by Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, working with Arup and the Porto engineers Afassociados, the stage designers Ducks Scéno, the acoustician Renz van Luxemburg and Petra Blaisse’s Inside Outside for the interiors.

The site, an old tram depot on the Rotunda da Boavista, was chosen in March 1999; the unusual structure ran four years late and cost 100 million euros, and missed its own festival year. It opened to the public on 14 April 2005 with Clã and Lou Reed and was inaugurated the next day in front of the president and prime minister with the Porto National Orchestra. The Casa da Música Foundation, set up in 2006, runs the building and its resident ensembles.

Tips

• A concert ticket is often no dearer than the tour and shows the hall doing its job; the Baroque orchestra’s programmes are the least known and the cheapest.
• The metro stop Casa da Música is on five lines, so the hall is on the way to and from the airport; the tour fits a last morning.
• The restaurant on the top floor and the rooftop terrace are open to non-concertgoers.
• Serralves, the other modern landmark, is a 20-minute walk west along the Avenida da Boavista or bus 201.

Nearby

• Rotunda da Boavista and its monument to the Peninsular War: on the doorstep.
• Serralves museum and park: 20 minutes on foot or bus 201.
• Bombarda gallery district: 15 minutes.
• Clérigos tower and the centre: 25 minutes on foot or two metro stops.