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is a
concert hall A concert hall is a cultural building with a stage that serves as a performance venue and an auditorium filled with seats. This list does not include other venues such as sports stadia, dramatic theatres or convention centres that may ...
located in
Kita-ku, Osaka is one of 24 wards of Osaka in Japan. Incidents and accidents 2021 Osaka building fire Notable locations Kita-ku, particularly the Umeda area surrounding Osaka Station, is one of the main commercial centers of Osaka. Kita-ku is also a fin ...
, Japan. It is run by the Asahi Building Co., Ltd., a Japanese real estate company controlling properties of the
Asahi Shimbun Company is one of the four largest newspapers in Japan. Founded in 1879, it is also one of the oldest newspapers in Japan and Asia, and is considered a newspaper of record for Japan. Its circulation, which was 4.57 million for its morning edition and ...
, and is housed in the Festival Tower, a skyscraper. The opening ceremony for the new hall was held on April 3, 2013. The new hall has 2,700 seats, the same number of seats as the original hall.About
- Festival Hall website
The hall is home to the
Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra The is a Japanese symphony orchestra based in Osaka, Japan. Founded in 1947 as the Kansai Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra took the name of the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra in 1960, and in 2014, formally assumed the official name of the Osaka P ...
. The orchestra moved its home to Symphony Hall in Oyodo-minami, Kita-ku after the original Festival Hall was closed in 2008, then moved again to the new Festival Hall one year after its opening.


Original venue

Festival Hall was opened in 1958, on the occasion of the first Osaka International Festival for which it was specially built. The Shin Asahi Building was renovated into a skyscraper named Festival Tower East, the plan for which was announced in April 2007 by Asahi Shinbun Company, a group that includes the Asahi Building Co., Ltd. The original Festival Hall closed on December 30, 2008, and was subsequently torn down. The original Festival Hall had great acoustic characteristics, loved by many renowned musicians, a number of whom such as
Tatsuro Yamashita , occasionally credited as Tatsu Yamashita or Tats Yamashita, is a Japanese singer-songwriter and record producer, who is known for pioneering the style of Japanese adult-oriented rock/soft rock music. His most well-known song is "Christmas E ...
had expressed strong concerns about the reconstruction of the Hall. British rock bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Ten Years After all played the Festival Hall in the early 1970s during their first visit to Japan. According to producer Jack Douglas, the audio from '' Cheap Trick at Budokan'' is actually from Osaka. The audio recording of the Tokyo show was unusable in 1978.


1975 Miles Davis concerts

On February 1, 1975, Festival Hall hosted a series of concerts by Miles Davis during the musician's tour of Japan. The performances were captured by Columbia Records' Japanese division, then known as
Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
, and released as two albums — '' Agharta'' (that day's afternoon concert) and ''
Pangaea Pangaea or Pangea () was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million y ...
'' (the evening show).


New venue

The construction of Festival Tower East started on January 9, 2010, and was completed on November 6, 2012. New Festival Hall was constructed on the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th levels of the skyscraper. The traditional features are preserved, letting sound shower down on the audience and the scale of a wide stage and the seating capacity of 2,700. The opening ceremony for the new hall was held on April 3, 2013. As the first event at the new hall, the 51st Osaka International Festival was held from April 10 to 26.


See also

* List of concert halls


References


External links

*
Festival Hall
at Discogs (list of concert recordings produced at the venue) Buildings and structures in Osaka Music venues completed in 2012 Concert halls in Japan Nakanoshima 2012 establishments in Japan {{Japan-struct-stub