Sarasota Orchestra Identifies Site for New Home

Florida’s Longest-Standing Orchestra Will Bring the Region its First State-of-the-Art Concert Hall Designed Specifically for Acoustic Music

SARASOTA, FL – March 24, 2022 – Sarasota Orchestra has entered into a purchase agreement for the land where it plans to build its new home, reaching a milestone in an eight-year process to meet a significant need for expansion.

Located at 5701 Fruitville Road, between Honore Avenue and Cattlemen Road, the 32-acre site will be anchored by an artistic asset currently not available from Tampa to Naples: a state-of-the-art acoustical concert hall. The site will also house new and increased performance, education, event, and outdoor space for the community.

Sarasota Orchestra Identifies Site for New Home

Florida’s Longest-Standing Orchestra Will Bring the Region its First State-of-the-Art Concert Hall Designed Specifically for Acoustic Music

SARASOTA, FL – March 24, 2022 – Sarasota Orchestra has entered into a purchase agreement for the land where it plans to build its new home, reaching a milestone in an eight-year process to meet a significant need for expansion.

Located at 5701 Fruitville Road, between Honore Avenue and Cattlemen Road, the 32-acre site will be anchored by an artistic asset currently not available from Tampa to Naples: a state-of-the-art acoustical concert hall. The site will also house new and increased performance, education, event, and outdoor space for the community.

Citing the region’s growth, its evolving arts and cultural base, and the need for increased capacity, Orchestra leaders shared their vision at its annual public information meeting for patrons, community members, musicians, and staff. The announcement marks a critical juncture in the Orchestra’s 73-year history and fulfills a longtime need for the organization’s continued artistic growth and service to the community.

Orchestra leaders are committed to engaging in listening sessions with nearby neighborhoods, diverse communities, civic leaders, and local arts organizations seeking input to develop a masterplan for the full 32-acre site. The land, which is currently undeveloped, will be purchased through private philanthropy that has already been fully raised by Sarasota Orchestra.

“We’re honored to be part of the growing momentum to elevate the area’s artistic and musical experiences, and to play an even greater role in contributing to the cultural, economic, educational and quality of life conditions of the greater Sarasota-Manatee area,” said Sarasota Orchestra President and CEO Joseph McKenna. “Our plans for this dynamic musical destination will bring to the community something it’s never had – a concert hall with outstanding acoustics that will transform the experience for patrons of our orchestra and the many local performing arts groups that will share our stage. This treasured asset will expand our region’s cultural capacity for the next century.”

Additional performance, rehearsal, practice, and music education space is acutely needed to serve local organizations, the region’s larger population and offer an array of experiences. With a state-of-the-art, acoustically engineered concert hall as its focal point, the new location creates a tremendous opportunity for Sarasota Orchestra, and other music and cultural organizations, to inspire new levels of innovation, collaboration, and discovery through diverse activities in a natural setting.

In addition, the site’s proximity to Interstate 75 increases accessibility to arts and cultural experiences for residents across the region and visitors from around the world. The location will serve as a gateway to the nearby, vibrant downtown Sarasota area.

“This is a pivotal moment in the Orchestra’s 73-year history, representing a bold, civic-minded vision about our future and our potential to enrich lives throughout the greater Sarasota area and beyond,” said Tom Ryan, chair of the Sarasota Orchestra’s board of directors. “Schedule limitations at existing venues place extraordinary burdens on cultural organizations both now and into the future. The opportunity to ease this pressure with well-designed acoustic space for music organizations will enhance and improve our region’s reputation as a premier destination for arts and culture in Florida.”

State-of-the-Art Space to Meet Evolving Community Needs

The plan for a new home builds on Sarasota Orchestra’s immediate and enduring commitment to bringing to the community a performance space designed and built to meet the unique needs of acoustic music. An estimated seven acres of the 32-acre site will be dedicated to a permanent home for the Sarasota Orchestra’s professional orchestra, extensive educational programs, and the internationally renowned Sarasota Music Festival.

Along with an 1,800-seat concert hall, the facility will include a 700-seat recital hall for chamber music and other flexible uses. Increased space will also support the Orchestra’s diverse education programs, expanding opportunities to partner more extensively with area schools and in reaching young people who are interested in exploring music and gaining skills of creativity, collaboration, and communication.

All performance and rehearsal spaces will incorporate noise and vibration control and isolation. Performance halls will also include contemporary technologies, patron conveniences and staging features to support creative and performing artists of the highest caliber. Informed by the COVID-19 pandemic, design considerations will also include flexible seating, air handling and related technology for audience safety.

The location provides ample space to serve more than just Sarasota Orchestra’s needs for a permanent home and primary performance space. Other community music and cultural organizations will be engaged to assess their needs to support a wide range of musical genres and cultural activities.

“We want to ensure that everyone in the community has access to the benefits of cultural expression,” said Bramwell Tovey, Sarasota Orchestra’s music director. “Music is not only a source of inspiration and beauty, but also fundamental to health, wellbeing and to enriching quality of life. This music hub will offer an ideal combination of both natural and artistic beauty.”

Bringing the Vision to Life

The vision for the full 32-acre site is still being formulated based on extensive community input over the coming months. Sarasota Orchestra anticipates the site may include walking trails, playgrounds, and water features. The upcoming insight gathering process will be the basis upon which the masterplan for the site will be developed.

About Sarasota Orchestra

Since 1949, Sarasota Orchestra has inspired and entertained music-lovers across the region and visitors from around the world. As the oldest continuing orchestra in the state of Florida, each year the 76-member Orchestra performs more than 100 classical, pops, chamber music and community outreach concerts. Sarasota Orchestra’s acclaimed music education program includes the Sarasota Youth Orchestras, established in 1959. Sarasota Orchestra is also the parent program of the world-renowned Sarasota Music Festival, founded in 1965. For further information, please visit www.SarasotaOrchestra.org.

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The Importance of the Right Space

Listening to—and performing—music in purpose-built space matters. It’s an entirely different experience.

Many of Sarasota Orchestra’s musicians have performed in some of the world’s premier spaces for classical music. Samantha Bennett, principal second violinist, shares her experience of playing in Boston’s Symphony Hall.

The Importance of the Right Space
Samantha Bennett - principal second violin, Sarasota Orchestra

Just as the right gallery space can put visual art in context, from Michelangelo’s 15th-century chapels to a modern warehouse space for a Warhol, the right acoustic space to listen to classical orchestral music is imperative. Certainly one can appreciate the merits of great art anywhere, but the experience is definitively improved when it is put in its most perfect context: when it is heard or seen in the best possible space.

For a musician performing in such a space, the differences between good and great seem all the bigger. Our ears are trained to seek out the tiniest differences in purity of sound, quality of tone and pitch, and subtlety of dynamic range. My experiences performing in Boston’s Symphony Hall, widely recognized as one of the top three halls for orchestras in the world, have only made clearer the necessity of a great space.

On the Symphony Hall stage, each level of dynamic is fully expressed, from the softest pianissimos to the loudest and most robust fortissimos. These dynamic levels are clear to those on stage and to those in the audience. Articulations—the length of a sound and the shape of its attack and decay—come through without force. Whole sections of the orchestra can blend together with an ease that is like sinking into a bath. When rehearsing and performing in a space where these details of our craft are easily identifiable, musicians and conductor can focus on other things, such as finding the right phrasing and pacing of a work. For the audience, it is like seeing a movie in full color. Through the magic of acoustic science, violins seem side-by-side with basses. Horns meld with oboes. Everything is easier; the music simply flows.

Furthermore, balancing the orchestra to determine which instruments and sections should be most or least heard in each phrase requires minimal work in a hall built for classical music. Great composers write for the capabilities of each instrument with careful dynamic marking marketing, and a stage like Symphony Hall allows for each section to follow exactly the directions indicated in the score and, in doing so, be perfectly heard.

Sarasota Orchestra is blessed with a wealth of great talent and creativity, deserving of the space and context that such talent merits. We are also blessed with a discerning audience, full of integrity. Performing in a space worthy of our talent and our audience would elevate the quality of our sound to a level that such an audience deserves to hear. Simply put, performing in such a hall is what we all deserve. Performing in a great hall gives us the freedom to let our instruments sing.

Community Q&A

Where is Sarasota Orchestra’s new site?

We have entered into a purchase agreement for 32 acres of land at 5701 Fruitville Road between Honore Avenue and Cattlemen Road. It is an ideal site for our future home, which will house new and increased performance, education, event and outdoor space for the community. We expect seven of the site’s 32 acres will be used for Sarasota Orchestra’s facility needs, providing ample opportunity for a wide range of other possible artistic and cultural activities, natural spaces and walking trails or playgrounds.

Why did Sarasota Orchestra select this location?

What will happen to the Orchestra’s current location?

What comes next?

Which other organizations will benefit from having access to the music center?

What is Music Director Bramwell Tovey’s involvement in the project?

When can I make gifts to support the project?