Sydney Opera House

Five days in Sydney. This is the city that most people associate with Australia - home of the iconic Opera House and host of the 2000 Olympics. Our first glimpse of the opera house was from a water taxi. We took five selfies and this was the best of the bunch. Ha.

We took a tour of the Opera House complex. It’s actually five theatres total. The two main theatres are the symphony hall with 3000 seats (where we would see a Beatles retrospective that night) and the opera hall, the smaller of the two. Beneath these two grand halls are three smaller venues.

 

On our way into the show

We got last minute tickets for an 8pm performance of a Beatles tribute to the albums Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. There were 5 singers and a full band. I thought the quality of the singing was pretty good, not amazing, but the acoustics in that room were spectacular.

View from our seats.

View from the back during the tour - we had seats up on the right

The architect was Jorn Utson (Danish) who was actually fired/quit half way through the completion because he was considered to be over budget and over time. It was estimated to take three years and $7 million (a significant extravagance in post war years), but was 14 years in the making at a cost of $102 million in total. The outside was totally Utson’s design, but the inside was the work of three replacement architects. Utson received an apology and was reinstated as “master architect” in 1999, right before it was registered on the World Heritage list. Utson designed one smaller venue at that time, but he never returned to Sydney to see his work or the completed opera house.

This view of the opera house from the land was surprising to me. The symphony hall is on the left and the opera house is on the right. Even though it is the smaller venue, it was titled “Opera House” because that was the tradition of the time. Though it was the Sydney orchestra community who were the impetus for its construction.

The Harbor Bridge is also a very cool view.

 

Harbor Bridge at night with special lighting

If you look carefully, you can see people climbing to the top of that bridge...