THE WHO announced yesterday that the final two concerts of its farewell tour will be held in Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens on Dec. 16 and Dec. 17. On the last night of the tour, a live broadcast will be carried by 20th-Century Fox on radio and television stations throughout North America.

"We chose Toronto because it's always been a great city for us, and for various technical reasons," said Pete Townshend at the press conference (which was held in Los Angeles and simultaneously broadcast to reporters in New York and Toronto).

"Speaking as an individual, Toronto would have been one of three or four cities I would choose even without other considerations. Perhaps it's because it has more of a European feeling and we're more at home there."

The four members of The Who, Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwisle and Kenney Jones, sat outside a Los Angeles hotel, blinking in the sunlight, behind a long table covered with fresh fruit. After several speeches from various executives who praised The Who, Townshend said it was far too early for him to be awake and that he was going back to bed as soon as the conference was finished.

However, he quickly took over the responsibility of answering the questions — not only from by Los Angeles reporters, but those telephoned in from New York and Toronto, and the conference turned into Townshend's ruminations on a variety of rock-related subjects.

Asked about the future of video, Townshend expressed mixed feelings: he praised video for helping break new bands on television, but complained about "its lack of depth. If you've been raised on music, pretty pictures aren't going to be enough." He agreed, though, that video had already changed the shape of rock music, especially in England, where, "performers such as Steve Strange are only as strong as their last video."

Asked why the band was planning to stop touring, Townshend said it had much to do with audience size: "As it is, I'm ready to drop dead after two hours on stage, and when you're playing to massive audiences of 50,000 to 60,000, it's very difficult to respond properly. The only solution is to become more detached and, once you've become detached from your audience, what's the point of continuing?"

He expressed regret about the recent break-up of The Jam (a band he recently hailed as "The Who of the Eighties") but said that, in fact, he preferred The Clash, both for its music and social concerns: "I've always said, if The Jam, The Sex Pistols and The Clash were all one band, they could have been really something."

Perhaps this most rueful comment was on the power of rock music itself: "I think rock has lost its penetrating power with audiences, which reflects a change in the passion of the artists making it, as well as other things — radio becoming more streamlined, more format-oriented and tied to advertising."