Places, Everyone!…Venue #2/25: The Opera House in Sydney, Australia

As I type these words it is January 26th. If you have any connection with the Land Down Under, then today is a special day for you, so Happy Australia Day to all who celebrate! It seems like the perfect time to profile one of the world’s great architectural achievements, the Sydney Opera House. In order to do this venue justice, I am going to break down my post into sections that will be devoted to the overall layout and design of the Opera House, the journey to seeing its construction through to fruition, some of the many ways in which the facility has been used and is still being used today, and finally, I will showcase one particular event that held great meaning for many Australians and which still stands today as the event that drew the biggest crowd in the history of the Sydney Opera House. Get ready for a tour of one of the architectural wonders of the world. Here is the Sydney Opera House.

In the 1950s, it was decided by the Australian government that a great entertainment and Arts facility should be built in Sydney, on the eastern coast of Australia in the region known as New South Wales. A call went out to architects from all over the world to submit designs for this new building. Drawing upon Australia’s connection to water and to immigration, Danish architect Jorn Utzon submitted a design that used sail-like concrete shells to create an image that almost resembled a fleet of square-rigged schooners. His design called for the creation of multiple performing arts venues within the overall complex. His design also included formal restaurants, pedestrian concourses and walkways, smaller meeting areas that could be used for performances or for conferences, as well as an amphitheatre that could be used for outdoor concerts.  All of this was to be located on a six acre site adjacent to Sydney Harbour. There ended up being over a dozen of these concrete “shells” built. On the exterior of each shell lay over one million tiles imported from Sweden. Although from a distance these shells look white or off-white, in reality they are multi-hued. Today, through the use of modern technology, the exteriors of the shells are used to project images such as art installations or as promotion for cultural events such as Australia Day or New Year’s Eve. Within the Sydney Opera House complex are housed performing venues for the Australian Symphony Orchestra (The Concert Hall), Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet (The Joan Sutherland Theatre), as well as a smaller dramatic arts theatre that can hold over 500 people for plays and presentations. Each performance space is climate controlled to meet the specific needs of the organizations that call it their professional home. Each performance space was also designed to be as acoustically perfect as possible, thus events held in The Concert Hall or The Joan Sutherland Theatre are always known for the excellent sound quality they possess. Two final notes on the building itself: one is that it is environmentally friendly. The entire six acre site is heated and cooled by water that is drawn from Sydney Harbour. The second is that the building was paid for using public money raised from the Australian Lotto. The Sydney Opera House is now paid off and is completely debt-free. The only costs incurred are those that come from the site’s maintenance and upkeep. The events held there generate more than enough revenue to pay for these and then some.

As mentioned earlier, the stunning design for the Sydney Opera House was created by architect Jorn Utzon from Denmark. As with any architectural project, whether it be something as basic as a house or something as grand as the Sydney Opera House, there are phases and stages to the design process. One of the things that is most noteworthy about the architectural grandeur of the finished project is how complex and difficult it was to actually build. Utzon’s initial designs that were submitted for consideration to the Australian government in the mid-1950s were just that, designs. The actual mathematics of bringing these designs to life was not yet factored into Utzon’s submission. There were many delays incurred throughout the construction process as engineers struggled to create the massive concrete shells in a way that allowed for them to be structurally stable. This was no small feat. In fact, one of the reasons that The Sydney Opera House is regarded so highly as an architectural marvel and why it has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site is, in part, because of the unprecedented feats of engineering that were needed to actually bring the design of Jorn Utzon into practical reality. This all took time to do. This is where politics come into the picture. Any project of such a scale as the Sydney Opera House requires an enormous investment of time, labour and money in order to make such a vision into a real building. Because public money was being used to finance construction, it meant that government overseers were involved in the process the whole way through. This caused several repercussions. First of all, the construction of the Opera House became a political football. Over the fourteen years that it took to complete construction, national governments changed several times. Each time a campaign was run, the huge cost of construction would come into play, as would time overages and the like. Each time a new government came into power, it meant a new committee of overseers would be established. They, in turn, would demand reports and analysis of the effectiveness and efficiency of the project be submitted all over again. Depending on the political bent of the politicians involved, demands would be made to cut corners in order to reduce expenses. In the very beginning, the first government that Utzon dealt with felt that four years would be more than sufficient to complete the entire project. They applied pressure to have workers on site twenty-four hours a day; they wanted to have control of the ordering of materials for construction, and so on. As a consequence of this political pressure and interference, Utzon resigned and had to be replaced by a committee of Australian architects. This caused a rift within the architectural community there who felt that Utzon should have been left alone to fulfill his creative vision and that this new committee were akin to scab workers during a strike. And speaking of strikes, the building of the Sydney Opera House turned out to be one of the galvanizing moments for Australia’s labour movement. In time, construction workers from all of the trade groups involved felt that they could not safely meet the work-related demands of the government, so they went on strike mid-project. At the end of the day, the construction workers’ strike helped forge new laws that govern their profession to this very day. Those laws concern everything from higher wages to safer working conditions (including limits on the number of hours a worker can be made to work in a day and, cumulatively, per week), as well as guaranteeing that onsite supervisors would be trained, certified professionals (as opposed to government overseers). In the end, fourteen years after the project was started, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip officially opened The Sydney Opera House. As for designer Jorn Utzon, he was brought back into the project near the end. There is even a gallery room named in his honour that you can visit if you should ever be so lucky as to go to Australia and tour the Opera House.

Since its inception, the Sydney Opera House averages almost half a million visitors each year. There are over one thousand events held there annually. If you happen to check out the Sydney Opera House website link below, you will see that its schedule is jam-packed with all sorts of concerts, art exhibits, public speakers and so on going on right now as you read these words. The Sydney Opera House is and always has been much more than simply an opera house. It is the cultural heart of Australia and home base for many Arts-related organizations from all across the country. In order to help you appreciate the cultural significance of the Sydney Opera House to the citizens of Australia, let me give you one example. This example is of an event that drew the single largest audience ever to an event held there. It was not the Sydney Summer Olympic Games, as you may have guessed. Instead, it was a benefit concert and a farewell concert all rolled into one. In 1996, much beloved Aussie band Crowded House had announced that they were calling it quits. Not unlike the situation in Canada when The Tragically Hip had one final tour before singer Gord Downie had to stop because of cancer, Crowded House were similarly a band that was stitched together from other bands that helped form the musical culture of Australia and of neighbouring New Zealand, too. The members of Crowded House can trace their musical heritage to bands such as Split Enz and Hunters and Collectors and then on to Crowded House. Neil Finn, Mark Seymour and Paul Hester formed Crowded House in the 1980s, and the band had many hit songs, including “World Where You Live”, “Fall at Your Feet”, “Something So Good”, “Better Be Home Soon”, “Into Temptation”and their biggest hit, “Don’t Dream It’s Over”. As the mid 1990s approached, drummer Paul Hester began to experience mental health issues with depression and the like. Touring became difficult, as did the recording of new material. So the band announced that it was going to have one final farewell tour. The final concert on that tour brought the band to the outdoor performance amphitheatre at The Sydney Opera House for a free concert that was aimed at raising money for a children’s hospital. It is estimated that well over 100,000 people attended the event, which was broadcast live on Australian national TV. As you can imagine, there was nary a dry eye at the event as the band played its final two songs in particular, the gorgeous and poignant Hunters and Collectors tune “Throw Your Arms Around Me”  and then, the final song, “Don’t Dream It’s Over”. I will also be including a five-minute interview with some people who were involved in the Crowded House concert in their capacity as official photographers for the event. I encourage you to watch that interview before watching the Crowded House concert clip because it will add an extra layer of context to what happened that evening in 1996. All in all, it was an emotional night for those who participated and for the whole of Australia. And none of it could have happened in a more beautiful spot.

Technology may make the world seem much smaller these days, but just the same, when one considers actually traveling from Canada (where I live) all the way to Australia to visit the Sydney Opera House, the vastness of our planet becomes apparent. As exotic as it sounds to travel there, I can’t see myself and my wife heading out that way any time soon. So, for now, I will live vicariously through the internet and view the Sydney Opera House online from the comfort of my couch. If any of you reading these words have made the trek, I’d be interested in hearing all about it. I would think that being there would be an amazing experience. After all, it isn’t every day that one gets to pay homage to an actual architectural wonder of the world.

The link to the official website for The Sydney Opera House can be found here.

The link to that interview about the Crowded House farewell benefit concert can be found here. 

The link to the actual Crowded House concert can be found here.

***One of my hopes with this entire series is too bring you inside of the various venues I am profiling so that you can get a better sense of what it would be like to actually attend a show there. Thus, please enjoy the following performances below that all show off the various performance spaces that make up the Sydney Opera House complex. NOTE: There are literally hundreds and hundreds of YouTube videos shot at the Sydney Opera House. The performances I am showing are not meant to give the impression that they are my favourite musicians or my favourite song, it is more that they show off some part of the architecture or ambiance of the facility and that is what I want you to see. That having been said, let’s start with the Outdoor Amphitheatre.

Outdoor Amphitheatre:

This is where Crowded House performed in the link above. Here are four other outdoor performances for your listening and viewing pleasure. All showcase the concrete shells and Sydney Harbour and the bridge very well.

Vance Joy: Riptide. ***This is a fun Alt-pop song. Joyful and peppy.

Rita Ora: Bang Bang. ***She co-hosted the Dick Clark New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show from Times Square with Ryan Seacrest. Nobody I was with knew who she was. For the record, Rita Ora is a British singer. “Bang, Bang” is one of her hits.

Thin Lizzy: The Boys Are Back in Town *This is the oldest clip I was able to find. (1978).

Simply Red: Holding Back the Years. *What a song! I wish I could sing like Mick Hucknall

The Concert Hall

The Concert Hall and The Joan Sutherland Theatre are the two major performance spaces inside of the Sydney Opera House complex. The Concert Hall is the biggest. It differs from the Joan Sutherland Theatre mainly by virtue of the fact that there is additional seating available behind the stage. This is usually so that choirs can sit there to accompany the Australian Symphony Orchestra. In a modern rock concert, it gives a theatre-in-the-round type of experience. HINT: When viewing any YouTube concert clip from an interior space, if the performer appears to be on a regular stage setup then, they are most likely in The Joan Sutherland Theatre. If there are musicians, choirs or audience members seated behind the stage then you are in The Concert Hall. These first clips will be from The Concert Hall.

Australian Symphony Orchestra: Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. ***This clip offers the clearest, brightest view of the interior of The Concert Hall.

2Cellos: Highway To Hell. ***These guys are great! Lots of crowd shots and concert hall shots and, of course, a big tip of the hat to Australia’s greatest band AC/DC.

The Joan Sutherland Theatre

***From these clips, as compared to the ones directly above, you can see that The Joan Sutherland Theatre is a more intimate performance space.

Aurora: Runaway. ***My favourite modern day female singer! I chose this clip because I DO love Aurora but more than that, I want you to hear the crystal clear acoustics on display in this performance. Enjoy.

The Cure: Pictures of You. ***It’s The Cure! Sydney Opera House has its own YouTube channel. This concert is shown in full, as are many others. Check out their channel and enjoy full sets by your favourite artists and bands.

Utzon Art Gallery

Named after architect Jorn Utzon, this gallery space is bright, airy and open to the outside world but the acoustics remain excellent here, too.

Camp Cope: The Opener. ***Sydney Harbour and the Royal Botanical Gardens can be seen through the large windows in the background.

I hope that you enjoyed these performances in the various spaces that make up the Sydney Opera House complex. If you simply want to go on a walking tour so as to see the architecture in greater detail, there are many YouTube videos that offer that, as well as videos that show the history of the construction process, the cultural importance of the building and so on. Have fun with your search. It is a rabbit hole worth getting lost in for a while. Enjoy.

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