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Feb. 6th, 2009 09:13 amI had a nice treat at lunchtime yesterday -- a free performance of the KW Symphony at CIGI.
The performance space is pretty spectacular. The Centre for International Governance Innovation is a non-profit, non partisan think tank funded by Jim Ballisle, one of the two Bazzillionaires in town who founded Research in Motion (Blackberry central, around here). (The other Bazzilionaire, Mike Lazaridis, funded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, just down the street. Sort of a philanthropic "I can pee farther than you can").
Anyway, CIGI is located the building which originally housed the Seagram Distillery (Seagram, the Cdn Whiskey dynasty, now spinning themselves out over bad investments in tech and entertainment). The original building is mid-18th century, an imposing earthtoned brick cube with shutter windows. In more recent times it housed the Seagram Museum, and when the City bought it and flipped it, the new tenants kept a lot of the decor. The lobby is decorated as an old post and beam barrelhouse. I can't find any good pictures of the performance surface itself, but they have constructed a large sunny atrium out of a marvellous combination of old timber and modern bare steel beams and trusses. A lot of the old distilling equipment has been built into the periphery of the new building.
Quite an aesthetic feast for the eyes and ears! Wish I could do it every lunch time. Playlist, for those that are interested, included an aria from Romeo and Juliet, the overture from Abduction from the Seraglio (Mozart), the waltz from Swan Lake (Tsaikovsky), some Dvorak, the Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso, and...one other that I have forgotten.
The performance space is pretty spectacular. The Centre for International Governance Innovation is a non-profit, non partisan think tank funded by Jim Ballisle, one of the two Bazzillionaires in town who founded Research in Motion (Blackberry central, around here). (The other Bazzilionaire, Mike Lazaridis, funded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, just down the street. Sort of a philanthropic "I can pee farther than you can").
Anyway, CIGI is located the building which originally housed the Seagram Distillery (Seagram, the Cdn Whiskey dynasty, now spinning themselves out over bad investments in tech and entertainment). The original building is mid-18th century, an imposing earthtoned brick cube with shutter windows. In more recent times it housed the Seagram Museum, and when the City bought it and flipped it, the new tenants kept a lot of the decor. The lobby is decorated as an old post and beam barrelhouse. I can't find any good pictures of the performance surface itself, but they have constructed a large sunny atrium out of a marvellous combination of old timber and modern bare steel beams and trusses. A lot of the old distilling equipment has been built into the periphery of the new building.
Quite an aesthetic feast for the eyes and ears! Wish I could do it every lunch time. Playlist, for those that are interested, included an aria from Romeo and Juliet, the overture from Abduction from the Seraglio (Mozart), the waltz from Swan Lake (Tsaikovsky), some Dvorak, the Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso, and...one other that I have forgotten.
