But the process of getting the hall ready for an amplified show is cumbersome – the drapes alone take hours to install – and the PA system is long past its prime.īut that’s not all. The space has had multiple smaller upgrades along the way to help it cope, including a high-quality PA system being installed and heavy drapery created to hang over the wood panelling. You have these two diametrically opposed ideals.” “You want the space to be as dead as possible. “Essentially it’s designed to be a big echo chamber, and that’s the opposite of what you want when you’re doing an amplified event,” he says. “The shows that we currently put in there were never in the initial scope for the hall,” says Andrew Mackonis, Sydney Opera House’s production manager. While rock bands – including Massive Attack and the National – are often set up in the outdoor forecourt, acts including Lizzo, Interpol, Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, the Wu-Tang Clan, José González and Hot Chip have played the concert hall. As a consequence, much effort has gone into compensating for its cavernous proportions, including wood-panelled walls to aid reverberation, and fibreglass acoustic reflectors hung from the roof to create a sonic ceiling.īut in the years since it was built interest in symphonies has been challenged by the ubiquity of pop, hip-hop and rock. And the rise of the rock concert has further challenged the venue, with amplified music and electronic sets being precisely the opposite of what the hall’s infrastructure was built to accommodate.īut, at 45 metres, the concert hall is at least 10 metres longer than most acoustic-oriented spaces, and double the optimum height. Members of the resident Sydney Symphony Orchestra have long complained that they cannot hear their fellow musicians on stage. The actor John Malkovich once said the acoustics in the concert hall “would do an aeroplane hangar a disservice”. It is very far from the best in the eyes, and ears, of some who have experienced it at close quarters. The irony of the Sydney Opera House is that it has become an international cultural landmark for the way it looks, rather than for being “the best opera house that can be built”, as the New South Wales premier Joe Cahill hoped when he launched the design competition in 1954. Now, as part of a five-year program in which the Opera House has been progressively upgrading its core infrastructure, construction is about to begin on a $150m revamp of its largest performance space, the 2,500-seat concert hall, designed to remedy the shortcomings born of the project’s messy origins.
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