“I said, ‘What do you worry about?’ He said, ‘I worry about train timetables, and I worry about the car park.’ That gave me the license to worry about those things.” “Early on I went to see Reynold Levy,” then the president of Lincoln Center, she recalled in a recent interview in her office. She said she quickly saw that while the acoustics and electrical wiring needed attention, so did the customers. Herron put together the hundreds of millions in funding, mostly from government sources. “I said, ‘I would like to renew the opera house for future generations,’” she recalled. Louise Herron, the opera house’s chief executive, arrived eight years ago for what she saw as an opportunity to finally accomplish the rehabilitation the institution had been eyeing for decades. A total of nearly 11 million visitors per year tramp around the public spaces, inside and out. It hosts nearly 2,000 events a year, attended by about 1.4 million people, in five theaters and two outdoor spaces. The complex has been in constant use since it opened. “It blows out of cannon ports up above, and then falls onto the stage, and very often turns the pages of the musicians as they play.”

“The air conditioning system is hopeless,” said Rory Jeffes, the leader of Opera Australia, who for many years was managing director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which plays in the opera house. Years of testing have produced a new plan for the concert hall’s acoustics - as well as for more basic matters. While its architect, Jorn Utzon, is now widely recognized as a visionary and his creation is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the hall’s construction was troubled, and certain problems have never been solved. As the building approaches its 50th birthday, in 2023, the interventions are necessary.

Sydney opera house