Venue: Tonhalle
Town: Zurich, CH

The Tonhalle is a concert hall in Zurich, home to the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, one of Switzerland's leading orchestras. The Tonhalle complex comprises two halls: the Grosser Saal (Great Hall), with 1,430 seats (816 in the stalls, 614 in the gallery and balcony), and the Kleine Tonhalle (Small Hall), with 609 seats. The Grosser Saal, located at Claridenstrasse 7, was inaugurated on 19 October 1895 by Johannes Brahms, who conducted the opening concert. The hall is considered to be "acoustically superb". In 1938, it made way for a new construction that now forms the building complex Kongresshaus Zürich. Public concert life in Zurich developed from the city's bourgeois music societies, which in 1812 united as the Allgemeine Musik-Gesellschaft Zürich (AMG), an amateur orchestra of around fifty musicians supplemented by professionals. For half a century the AMG was the principal institution for public concerts in the city, lending its orchestra to the Aktientheater im Casino, founded in 1834. Both venues operated from buildings of the former Barefoot Friars' monastery between Hirschengraben and Neumarkt. From 1850 Richard Wagner worked in Zurich and drew large audiences, but the cramped concert facilities led him to withdraw from the city's concert life in 1855. His departure intensified longstanding calls for a permanent professional orchestra and a purpose-built concert hall. In 1867 the Kornhaus am See, a former granary on what is now Sechseläutenplatz, was converted into a festival hall accommodating up to 3,600 people for the festival of the Swiss Music Society. A 1,400-seat concert hall and a restaurant with a palm garden were subsequently installed there. Despite acoustic deficiencies, the hall - known as the "old Tonhalle" - served Zurich's concert life for nearly thirty years. In 1868 the Tonhalle-Gesellschaft was founded, taking over the orchestral society established in 1862 (around thirty mostly amateur instrumentalists), which became the Tonhalle-Orchester.