The Sage Gateshead

The Sage Gateshead is a centre for musical education, performance and conferences, located in Gateshead on the south bank of the River Tyne, in the north-east of England. It opened in 2004. The venue is part of the Gateshead Quays development, which also includes the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. The centre occupies a “curvy glass and stainless steel” building designed by Foster and Partners, Buro Happold (structural engineering), Mott MacDonald (building services) and Arup (acoustics), with views of Newcastle and Gateshead Quaysides, the Tyne Bridge, and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.

The planning and construction process cost over £70 million, which was raised primarily through National Lottery grants. The contractor was Laing O’Rourke. The centre has a range of patrons, notably The Sage Group plc who contributed a large sum of money to have the building in their name. Sage Plc have helped support the charitable activities of The Sage Gateshead since its conception.

The venue opened over the weekend 17 – 19 December 2004. Rather than open in traditional fashion with a gala concert, The Sage Gateshead offered free admission to an opening weekend showcasing a variety of performers in diverse styles, in keeping with its philosophy that no genre of music should be valued above another.

The Sage Gateshead contains three performance spaces; a 1,700-seater, a 400-seater and a smaller rehearsal and performance hall, Northern Rock Foundation Hall. The rest of the building was designed around these three spaces to allow for maximum attention to detail in their acoustic properties. 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 an intimate venue, also acoustically excellent and possibly the world’s only ten-sided performance space. Even the building’s concourse was designed with attention to acoustic properties, allowing it 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.

The building is open to the public even when there are no performances taking place. Visitors can see rehearsals, soundchecks and workshops in progress. It has five bars, a brasserie, the “Sir Michael Straker Café”, and “The Barbour Room” – a multi-purpose function room which holds around 200 people.