Nakanoshima Festival Tower Osaka Japan01

is a concert hall located in Kita-ku, Osaka, 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 an ...

, 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 Soft rock, adult-oriented rock/soft rock music. His most well-known song is "C ...

had expressed strong concerns about the reconstruction of the Hall. British rock bands like Pink Floyd,

Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The group comprised vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. With a heavy, guitar-driven sound, they are ci ...

, Deep Purple and

Ten Years After Ten Years After are a British rock group, most popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973, the band had eight consecutive Top 40 albums on the UK Albums Chart. In addition, they had twelve albums enter the US ''Billboar ...

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 ''Cheap Trick at Budokan'' is the first live album by American rock band Cheap Trick, and their best-selling recording. It was first released in Japan on October 8, 1978, and later released in the United States on February 1979, through Epic R ...

'' 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 Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...

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 professiona ...

, 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.

References

External links

*
Festival Hall
at

Discogs Discogs (short for discographies) is a database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. While the site was originally created with a goal of becoming the ...

(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

Original venue

1975 Miles Davis concerts

New venue

See also

References

External links