Opera’s Second Coming

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.