This Is The Place For A Recital Hall

The Age

Thursday December 1, 2005

IT HAS taken many years, but at last Melbourne is to have its own purpose-built recital hall: a home for the sort of music and musicians who have had to make do with venues either too big or inappropriate for smaller-scale performances. With this week's launch of the Melbourne Recital Centre, due to open in late 2008, the missing link in this city's cultural life is to be forged. The site on the corner of Southbank Boulevard and Sturt Street will become a complex shared with the Melbourne Theatre Company. The recital centre will house two performing venues: the 1000-seat Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, named after Victoria's most venerable cultural philanthropist; and a 150-seat space, the Salon, to be used for performances and as a recording studio.

The centre is especially welcome because, from the very beginning of its planning, it involved those who will use it or benefit from its presence. Vital to its gestation has been an industry reference group, comprising performers, technicians, administrators, composers and other key figures, which has advised on how the centre should be developed. "A finely tuned instrument," Arts Minister Mary Delahunty said this week. Yes, and one fashioned with music in mind.

Such developments do not come cheaply, and the State Government's investment in the $44.5 million centre is an admirable part of its legacy. Yet we still wonder why it has taken so long to realise, especially when such a gap in our cultural jigsaw has been so obvious for so many decades. To shift disciplines, imagine if the Commonwealth Games were to happen in a city that had every sporting venue except a velodrome. No arguments or delays there. It would be built. Why should the arts be any different?

© 2005 The Age

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