Boss appointed for new multi-arts centre:

Aussie takes on top arts job
Judith Isherwood comes from the Sydney Opera House. From the BBC website.

The woman credited with transforming the role of Sydney Opera House has been appointed to run the Wales Millennium Centre project.
Australian Judith Isherwood was the director of performing arts and acting chief executive of the Sydney Opera House and her move to Wales is seen as a coup.

The £104m arts complex in Cardiff Bay is due to open in November 2004 with a gala performance featuring Welsh-born opera baritone Bryn Terfel, who recently laid a symbolic piece of Welsh slate at the foundations.

Ms Isherwood begins her new job as chief executive at the end of March and will immediately be busy organising the centre's gala opening night.

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Opera chief leaves Sydney for £104m Cardiff Bay centre
By Terry Kirby for The Independent

In a significant coup for Wales, the Millennium Centre arts complex in Cardiff has recruited a key figure from the Sydney Opera House (SOH) to be its first chief executive.

Judith Isherwood, 42, director of performing arts and acting chief executive of the SOH, will take up her new role in Wales in March. The £104m centre is currently under construction and not due to open until November next year.

Although the appointment will be largely welcomed, it will also be seen as another sign of the lack of home-grown heavyweight arts administrators in the UK. Four of the country's leading arts venues are now being run by administrators from overseas.

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Singing on the dock of the bay
Even if Cardiff lost its nerve about having a truly breathtaking new opera house, the compromise building still has many virtues. By Deyan Sudjic for The Observer

Sitting on the edge of Cardiff Bay, trapped deep inside the Wales Millennium Centre, tightly bound by the thousand silken ropes that constitute the pious compromises and partnerships, revenue streams and accessibility deals of almost any publicly funded cultural project, is an opera house.

Struggling to get out from behind the walls of raw slate, boilerplate steel and rough- sawn timber slats that its architects have raised like the radar shield of a stealth bomber to distract attention from the rarefied world of musical drama is a 1,900-seat, three tier, horseshoe-shaped and cave-like auditorium that the Welsh National Opera will inaugurate in November.

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Arts’ Millennium home
By Peter Hepple for The Stage


One of the world’s biggest arts developments, the Wales Millennium Centre is the new home of the Welsh National Opera and six other diverse arts companies. Peter Hepple takes a look at an impressive building and a groundbreaking venue

The Wales Millennium Centre in the Cardiff Docks area is already attracting the type of newspaper headlines that ask ‘national jewel or white elephant?’

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London may get the hump as Wales opens a top spot on world arts stage
By Simon de Bruxelles for The Times


AMID fanfare and fireworks, one of the last of the great Millennium projects is officially declared open this weekend.

Locally nicknamed the Armadillo, the £106 million Wales Millennium Centre in the docklands south of Cardiff will put Europe’s youngest official capital city on the cultural world map, according to those behind the project.

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