City Recital Hall – Angel Place, off Martin Place – Paling's, the Ash Street Music Precinct and Sydney's Shoebox Concert Hall – 1999 to Today

Most Sydneysiders who've been to a concert at City Recital Hall remember the walk in. You leave Pitt Street or George Street, duck into a narrow lane, pass under a cluster of empty birdcages hanging overhead, and come to a lit-up entrance tucked in under an office tower. That lane is Angel Place, and the hall at number 2 has been one of the best rooms in the country for chamber music since 1999.

The entrance to City Recital Hall in Angel Place. Photo: Jason7825, 2009, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

Before the hall: Ash Street and the music shops

The hall sits in a pocket of laneways between George, Pitt and Martin Place, and this corner of town had music in it long before the City of Sydney built a concert hall here. The Dictionary of Sydney describes City Recital Hall as part of a big redevelopment of "the music and business precinct which had existed for over a century around Ash Street".

Much of that was down to one man. William Henry Paling was a Dutch-born musician who set up a music warehouse in Wynyard Square in the 1850s. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that he opened a showroom at 352 George Street in 1875, another in Ash Street in 1880, and bought big premises at 356 George Street in 1883. The Dictionary of Sydney says Paling's building in Ash Street went up in 1888, straddling the Tank Stream, and that only its facade survives today.

Inside Paling's there was a concert hall. The AusStage performing arts database lists Paling's Concert Hall at 2 Ash Street from 1904 until it closed at the end of 1963, used mainly for recitals and to show off the instruments Paling's sold. In January 1964 the hall's fittings, including 210 chairs, were advertised for sale. AusStage also records radio test broadcasts there in January 1923. From 1942 to 1957 part of the old Paling's building was L'Hermitage, a French restaurant run by Henry and Jeanne Renault. The Dictionary of Sydney says Robert Menzies was one of its regulars.

A wet day in Angel Place in the 1930s. Photo: Sam Hood, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The City of Sydney's laneways policy says Ash Street was formed by a subdivision in 1886 and was once lined along its whole length by "richly modelled 19th and early 20th Century buildings". It says the lane's architecture and atmosphere once rivalled Rowe Street. The policy also lists Palings Lane, describing it as a rare pedestrian route from early Victorian Sydney, a forerunner of the great shopping arcades.

As for Angel Place, a City of Sydney Archives photograph from 1989 shows the corner of Pitt Street and Angel Place, where the building was "formerly the Angel Hotel". I haven't found a primary source that says for sure the lane was named after the hotel, so take that link as likely rather than certain.

The Rhine Castle Bistro in Angel Place, January 1966. Photographer unknown, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

Sydney needed a middle-sized hall

By the 1990s Sydney had the Opera House and the Town Hall, but nothing in between that was built for chamber music. City Recital Hall's own history says the venue was designed to answer the city's need for a mid-sized hall with the acoustics for serious music. It had to be intimate enough for the players and the audience to feel close, but big enough to pay its way for concert promoters.

The answer was a deal between the City of Sydney and AMP. AMP was building a new office tower, and the ground floors would be given over to the hall. The architects, Peddle Thorp and Walker, describe the project as part of a large commercial development jointly funded by the AMP Society and the City of Sydney. An older venue listing on Eventfinda says the hall was held on a 99-year lease from AMP.

The hall was officially opened on 30 October 1999, and the Dictionary of Sydney gives the same date. The hall says it was the first purpose-built music venue in Sydney since the Opera House opened in 1973. Historian Lisa Murray wrote the City of Sydney's history of how it came about, Musical Chairs: The Quest for a City Recital Hall, in 2005.

The Angel Place tower, with the hall in its lower floors. Photo: VirtualWolf, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

A shoebox, on purpose

The inside is a shoebox, a long rectangular room. Peddle Thorp and Walker say they drew on the 19th-century concert hall, with its shoebox form and two U-shaped galleries, to give "a strong sense of occasion". The seats are in three tiers, with gently raked stalls and the two galleries wrapping around the sides and back. The architects give the capacity as 1,250. The hall itself and the Dictionary of Sydney both say 1,238, and that's the figure the venue uses now.

The finishes are French grey, gold leaf, light timber panelling and plum-coloured seats. A white Carrara marble staircase sweeps up from the foyer to three levels of lobbies. The architects say they marked the entrances with brightly lit tower elements so you could see them from the ends of the narrow laneways.

Inside the hall: the shoebox shape and the wrap-around galleries. Photo: Jason7825, 2009, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

How it sounds

The acoustic designers were Arup Acoustics. Eventfinda's venue notes say they worked closely with the groups who would use the room: Musica Viva, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. A paper by the Arup acousticians Rob Harris and Peter Griffiths, presented at the 2010 International Symposium on Room Acoustics, gives the occupied reverberation time as 1.75 seconds. Other sources round it to 1.8. The paper says the room is large for a recital hall because the economics of seat sales against the cost of touring ensembles from overseas pushed it that way.

The same paper explains a few of the tricks. The angled balcony fronts send early reflections in from the sides, and the architecture itself was designed to scatter sound. A performers' balcony sits where a pipe organ would normally be the visual focus. The hall also has banners that move up and down, and sound-absorbing panels, so it can be tuned from an orchestra down to a speaker at a lectern. The architects say this variable system was there so the hall could host conferences and AMP's annual general meetings too.

Who plays there

The hall calls itself the CBD home of five key presenting partners: the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva Australia, Pinchgut Opera and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Its program has spread a long way from the classics. It now runs jazz, rock, indie, cabaret and world music, and since 2023 the seating on level one can be taken out for standing and dance events.

In 2015 City Recital Hall Limited was set up as a not-for-profit company to run the venue for the City of Sydney. The hall says it remains a City of Sydney venue on a long-term lease from the building's current owners, Mirvac. A big refurbishment of the foyers, bars and amenities was finished in 2024, and the same year a new d&b Soundscape sound system went in.

City Recital Hall at night. Photo: Jason7825, 2009, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The birdcages

Those birdcages over the lane are an artwork called Forgotten Songs by Michael Thomas Hill. The City of Sydney Archives say it began as a temporary installation and was made permanent. The Dictionary of Sydney says it remembers the songs of fifty birds that were once heard in central Sydney before the city pushed them out. Stand under it at night and you can hear their calls playing.

Forgotten Songs, the birdcage artwork over Angel Place. Photo: Setimmp, 2016, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A closer look at the Forgotten Songs cages. Photo: Greenpark79, 2024, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

Next time you're heading to a concert, walk in through Ash Street instead of the front. You'll be passing the old Paling's facade, where Sydney bought its pianos and sheet music for the best part of a century.

Angel Place, looking along the lane. Photo: VirtualWolf, 2017, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Where this came from

• City Recital Hall: About City Recital Hall (cityrecitalhall.com/about).
• Dictionary of Sydney: City Recital Hall; Palings Warehouse; The Hermitage; Angel Place.
• PTW Architects: City Recital Hall – Angel Place (project page).
• Rob Harris and Peter Griffiths, "Auditorium acoustic design: 30 years, 15 projects", ISRA 2010, Australian Acoustical Society.
• Eventfinda: City Recital Hall, Sydney (venue notes).
• Edward Duyker / ADB: William Henry Paling, Australian Dictionary of Biography.
• AusStage: Paling's Concert Hall, 2 Ash Street (venue 14974).
• City of Sydney: Policy for Management of Laneways in Central Sydney; City of Sydney Archives: Angel Place; John and Merivale's Place, 1989.
• Lisa Murray, Musical Chairs: The Quest for a City Recital Hall, City of Sydney, 2005 (cited, not read).