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. 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 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. There is also "ExploreMusic": a technologically well-equipped musical branch of Gateshead public library, stocking books, and current magazines covering all aspects of music, a CD library with listening posts, and computers with free internet access, subscriptions to music websites, and music software.


Description harvested from Wikipedia

The Window Cleaners






A short video shot in and around Sage.