An 1894 concert hall with the best acoustic in the country, restored over seven years and reopened in 2021.
Hart Massey, of the Massey-Harris farm machinery family, paid for it as a memorial to his son Charles, and it opened in 1894 with Handel’s Messiah.
The exterior is a plain, rather awkward brick box in a loosely Moorish Revival style. The interior is one of the great concert rooms of North America: a horseshoe of two balconies, seating around 2,700, with an acoustic that musicians have described in extravagant terms for over a century.
What has happened in it
Enrico Caruso, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould’s Toronto debut, Winston Churchill, the Dalai Lama.
“Jazz at Massey Hall” in May 1953 — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, recorded and released as one of the most celebrated live jazz albums ever made. The hall was half empty because a Marciano fight was on the same night.
Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Rush and Joni Mitchell all have long associations. Lightfoot played it around 170 times.
The restoration
Massey Hall closed in 2018 for a seven-year, roughly $180 million revitalisation and reopened in November 2021.
The work restored the original stained-glass windows, which had been boarded over since 1933 to block streetcar noise; removed the fire escapes that had been bolted across the façade; rebuilt the seating and sightlines; and added a new tower behind with rehearsal and recording space and a small basement venue.
The acoustic was protected throughout and, by general account, improved.
The programme
Popular music more than classical now — singer-songwriters, jazz, folk, comedy and touring acts, roughly 100 to 150 nights a year.
Tickets are moderate by international standards.
Roy Thomson Hall
Toronto’s other major concert hall, a mirrored-glass drum at King and Simcoe from 1982, home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Its acoustic was poor at opening and was substantially rebuilt in 2002; it is now good. It is a much larger and colder room than Massey.
TIFF uses it for premieres.
The others
The Danforth Music Hall, 1919, for mid-size touring acts. The Horseshoe Tavern on Queen West, open since 1947, where a great many Canadian bands started. Lee’s Palace in the Annex. The Rex for jazz nightly.
The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres on Yonge Street are the last operating double-decker Edwardian theatre in the world — two complete auditoriums stacked, the upper one hung with 5,000 preserved beech branches. Tours run and are excellent.
Practicalities
Queen or Dundas station on Line 1, both a few minutes’ walk. Doors typically an hour before.
The building is now fully accessible, which it was not before 2018.
