THE orchestra's hypnotic performance of Ravel's Bolero had brought the crowd to its feet. As people filed out, some slapped the back of a beaming, middle-aged man. A fruity English voice said: "Ah'd call that lift orf, wouldn't you?" Michael Lynch drawled: "Yair …"
His broad Australian accent stood out among the rounded vowels of London's Royal Festival Hall audience on Monday night, and so it should have. In 2002 Lynch was headhunted from his job running the Sydney Opera House to complete a huge renovation of the much-loved London music venue on the south bank of the Thames.
It was a tough assignment; the project had been troubled for decades. But this week the chief executive of London's Southbank Centre, which runs the Royal Festival Hall, finished the £115 million ($270 million) refurbishment on time and virtually on budget.
More than 18,000 performers and an estimated 250,000 people thronged the building as itreopened last weekend. Bollywood dancers performed alongside a same-sex Latin cabaret. Jarvis Cocker took a turn as a DJ, and Billy Bragg gave guitar lessons.
Meanwhile, critics sing the building's praises. To The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey, the new hall is "great, not as in the biggest, shiniest and most extreme, but great as in big spirited, a building of substance rather than spin".
Despite his apparent triumph, though, Lynch's thoughts are turning to home. He plans to spend 18 months bedding down the changes then return to his beloved Sydney and make a pitch for the last big job of his career.
"I might come back as lord mayor of Sydney," he says with a grin. "Yes, I'm serious, though Sydney might not be serious about it for me. But I would love to grab hold of Sydney and give it a shake while I am still standing."
If Lynch - who has also run the Australia Council and the Sydney Theatre Company - is not short on chutzpah or self-belief, that's why he got the London job.
The Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, the Labour Government's "tonic for a nation" emerging from the gloom of war and postwar austerity. The prime minister, Clement Attlee, said it would "show that we are not just a nation of shopkeepers but a people who appreciate and practise the arts".
Hailed as Britain's first major modernist building, the Royal Festival Hall was avowedly democratic, despite its name. The 3000-place auditorium had no bad seats. Entrances were at the sides, not front and back, and foyers were spacious and open, with no private bars.
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