The Sydney Symphony’s new music director is impressed by the hall’s newly installed acoustic ‘petals’. She tells the Morning Herald:

‘We were trying out various constellations and positioning of the orchestra under various heights of those wonderful petals, which we can move up and down to optimise the space for a particular work or size of orchestra. And we were just blown away by the clarity and the beauty of the sound. It’s just marvellous.

‘I would play a passage through with the orchestra and then my assistant would continue to conduct it a few times while we tried different constellations and arrangements and slowly came to a set of what are, for us now, the sort of default settings that we will start in, but it’s not the work of a week, it’s the work of quite a few months.

‘I hope there will be a continuation of what we have been establishing in these first few weeks: a deeper study of some of the great classics, a broadening of that repertoire to works less often heard here in Sydney, and also a commitment to the development of new work.’