The Globe and Mail

Opera is ethereal, but pouring the foundations of an opera house also produces a certain music. For example, there is the squelch-squelch of my rubber boots as they wade through the muddy remnants of a burst water main that flooded the site with five feet of water on the evening of Nov. 14 (no doubt an impressive orchestral tutti there). And now there's the whoosh of four tons of wet concrete slipping out of a giant bucket into the 8-by-8-foot hole of a foundation footing. "With the broken main and the incredible amount of rain, we're way behind schedule. So it's all hands on deck," says Dave, a blond, fresh-faced construction engineering student from the University of Western Ontario. Normally he helps with the paperwork in the on-site trailer office of PCL, the company overseeing the building of Toronto's new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, scheduled to open in the summer of 2006. But today he's bending his back with the labourers to make up for lost time.