Concert Venues: Beijing

Beijing has four official concert venues which devote themselves primarily to classical or concert music: the Beijing Concert Hall, the Forbidden City Concert Hall, Poly Theatre and the National Centre for the Performing Arts. All four venues function have their own production companies. The NPCA, Poly Theatre and the Peking University Hall have stage opera capabilities. • The National Centre for the Performing Arts (which held its inaugural concert in December 2007), is an enormous structure, seated centrally next to Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City Concert Hall, and the Beijing Concert Hall. It has three state-of-the-art halls collected under one roof, suited for grand opera, orchestra or chamber music. The venue has already seen significant national and world media coverage in its first few seasons, and may likely serve as a seat for both some of the larger festivals as well as official government functions. With financial considerations, the major concert halls subsist through minimum subsidies and secondarily through ticket sales. The other major concert halls are directly funded by the entity owning them. For special events, they may seek funding from outside agencies and, increasingly, private companies. • The Beijing Concert Hall is supervised by the Ministry of Culture. Poly Theatre is itself directly run by the private company Poly Theatre Company. Forbidden City Concert Hall is licensed as a private company as the Beijing Poly Forbidden City Theatre Management Company with the Beijing Bureau of Culture and the Poly Theatre Company as joint investors. .