Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Van Cliburn suggested it; two 48-foot angels guard it. The Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall at 525 Commerce Street opened on 1 May 1998, a 65-million-dollar, privately funded European-style opera house that instantly placed Fort Worth among America's elite performing-arts cities. Architect David M. Schwarz crowned the Founders Concert Theater with an 80-foot dome painted with sky by brothers Scott and Stuart Gentling, and sculptor Marton Varo carved the facade's two trumpet-blowing angels from Texas Cordova Cream limestone - 48 feet tall, 52 pieces and 146 tons the pair, the largest works of the sculptor's life and now the city's cultural icons. The 2,042-seat hall was built as a true multi-purpose room and houses four resident companies: the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Opera, Texas Ballet Theater and - fittingly, given whose idea the building was - the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, whose quadrennial finals put the stage on classical music's world map. Performing Arts Fort Worth, the non-profit owner-operator, layers touring Broadway, popular entertainment and family series on top, driving the building past 300 performances a year alongside the adjacent Maddox-Muse Center's recital and event spaces. The Children's Education Program has brought more than 1.7 million schoolchildren to the hall since 1998, with 70,000 more each season, embedding the building in the region's civic life well beyond its ticket buyers. Sundance Square's restaurants surround the block, and the hall's silhouette - dome, angels, limestone - has become downtown Fort Worth's signature postcard, a building whose confidence matches the city that willed it into being. The dome's trompe-l'oeil sky and the hall's horseshoe tiers were tuned as carefully for the ear as the eye - the room converts between symphonic and amplified configurations without losing the warmth that made it an instant favourite of visiting soloists. The angels, assembled from 52 limestone blocks, took sculptor Varo three years; locals measure them as six Brooke Shields tall, his own preferred unit, and they have anchored every postcard of downtown Fort Worth since.