Hitting the right note
In 2009, Québec signed a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership contract that proves music does not lie outside the bounds of alternative procurement
CATCH A PERFORMANCE of Beethoven's 9th Symphony at Montreal's Place des Arts and you might be a little bit underwhelmed by what you hear. It's not the performers - the Montreal Symphony Orchestra is a world-class symphony. But Place des Arts, a multi-purpose facility dating back to the 1960s, is not the ideal setting for a symphony.
"It's not really dedicated to acoustic and symphonic music. So they're currently performing in an environment that is not optimal for their needs," says Pierre Benoit, project director at Infrastructure Québec.
So the Québec Ministry of Culture and Communications, which places a premium on promoting and expanding the province's musicians, decided it needed to build a new, state-of-the-art concert hall for the symphony.
For investors more familiar with toll roads and power assets, a concert hall may not seem like infrastructure. But Infrastructure Québec didn't see it that way.