The pavilion in question is an astonishing creation: a 600-seat opera house in the heart of the coutryside.
A spirit of practicality seems embedded in Central City's 550-seat opera house, as pervasive as the smell of old wood and greasepaint.
The festival specializes in lesser-known operas, producing them in a charming 900-seat opera house dating from 1903 and situated along the city's picturesque, expansive central park.
It houses three theatres and a princely 700-seat opera house (www.ort.ro), tickets for which cost a gloriously un-elitist £5, a steal even by Romanian standards.
Employing the finest craftsmen of the day he spent five years building a fanciful collection of pocket gardens, banquet rooms, prayer halls and a single-seat opera house.
"When I do a concert of an aggressive political piece from the '30s in a gorgeous, 2,000-seat opera house, it makes me think about a lot of things," Mr. Gold said.
But a hundred yards across the garden is the barn they have gradually converted into a 500-seat opera house and where they will soon be staging Tristan and Isolde.
Designed by Frank Gehry, the nearly completed $62 million complex will include a 900-seat opera theater and concert hall and a smaller dramatic theater along with two large theater and dance studios in which performances can also take place.
There's no need to apologise: I'm gobsmacked by the sight of a perfectly proportioned 480-seat opera house, complete with the Royal Opera House's old red-velvet seats, thrown away after Covent Garden's refurbishment.
How the company could permanently cut prices across the board without running a catastrophic deficit is difficult to imagine, but one thing seems fairly certain: a twenty-five-dollar-a-seat opera house wouldn't have to work very hard to sell out.
What began as an offshoot of an art exhibition now consists of more than 40 original performances of what Mr. Chong calls "seated opera of the spoken word," each made up of marginalized voices telling their stories in a theatrical context.
