Opera’s Second Coming
Adrian Mourby welcomes a new wave of opera houses around the world, and compares this with the previous surge in the late 19th century.
This month sees the opening of the £106 million Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, the latest in a wave of new opera houses being built for the twenty-first century. In 2002 Singapore unveiled ‘The Durian’, its spiky music theatre on the river esplanade. In 2003 Tenerife inaugurated Santiago Calatrava’s white-winged ‘Auditorio’ and in January 2005 Copenhagen will formally open Henning Larsen’s new opera house, to be named after Queen Margarita. Meanwhile building work on further opera houses is steaming ahead in Toronto and in Oslo.
Already on the drawing-board are two iconic buildings for Russia and the USA. Dallas has a new opera house in the pipeline from Sir Norman Foster and St Petersburg a second Marinsky Theatre in the shape of a huge golden sack on the banks of the Neva, by the architect Dominique Perrault.
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