Palatial, gorgeous ... but why can't they sort out telephone booking?
Photograph: Owen Humphrys/PA
Just gone for the first time to the Sage in Gateshead, the marvellously big and curvy Foster-designed music centre on the south bank of the Tyne, which opened in the summer.

Violinist Peter Cropper, late of the Lindsay String Quartet, was playing in a newly formed piano trio in the smaller of the two auditoria at Sage - an intimate, really beautiful space for chamber music and small-scale music theatre that can be reconfigured so the performers are in the centre or on a stage at the side.

Tonight they were in the centre of the space - Cropper has always preferred music "in the round" and it's not hard to figure out why. There's a visceral intensity to being so close to the performers that you can hear them breathe, almost feel their breath. Instead of a chilly distance between the audience and musicians who might just as well be playing Beethoven to themselves, you start to feel bound up in the drama that connects the players, almost part of the performance.

Sage is gorgeous and palatial, with stunning vistas over the Tyne. Four niggles. You can book some events, but not every event, online. Why? Second, there are deafening announcements up to half an hour before the performance starts, containing the tediously redundant information that the performance will start ... in half an hour. Third, the posh restaurant is, while very expensive, fabulously uninviting, situated in a sort of windowless corridor.

Fourth, telephoning the box office to find out what time the concert was going to end nearly killed me. The system eschews hold music, which is probably an aesthetic decision (and understandable). Problem is hold music is so ubiquitous I thought I'd been cut off when confronted by silence, and it took me a couple of goes to figure out I had to persist.

A recorded message advised me to try later if I was on hold for more than 10 minutes - which struck me as a real admittance of failure. How can an organisation like this allow people to sit on hold for five, leave alone 10 minutes? I don't know, but they did ...