Teatro Colón

Teatro Colón sits in rarefied company. National Geographic ranks it among the ten best opera houses on Earth, and Acoustics Today puts it in the top five concert halls for sound, alongside venues in Vienna, Boston, Berlin, and Amsterdam that never had to work around a horseshoe-shaped auditorium to get there. The building standing today isn’t even the original. Its predecessor ran from 1857 to 1888 on the site the Banco Nación now occupies, and it took Buenos Aires another twenty years to open the current theater with a performance of Verdi’s Aida in 1908.

For its first seventeen years, the Colón filled its seasons by importing foreign companies wholesale. That changed in 1925, when the theater finally assembled its own resident orchestra, ballet, and chorus, sparing the city the trouble of borrowing culture indefinitely. Copland, Bernstein, Pavlova, and Perlman have all since taken the stage, part of a guest list long enough to double as a small UN roster. The theater marked its hundredth birthday in 2008 with a restoration project, a great way to mark a centennial!