The theatre has become the biggest performing centre in southern China and is one of the three biggest theatres in the nation alongside Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts and Shanghai's Shanghai Grand Theatre.[4]
May 2010 saw American filmmaker Shahar Stroh direct the premiere production of the opera house: Puccini's opera Turandot[1] which had in previous years been a controversial opera in China.[5]
The project cost 1.38 billion yuan (approx. US$200 million).[6][7]
Design
The structure was designed by Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.[8] It is conceived as two rocks washed away by the Pearl River.[9] Its freestanding concrete auditorium set within an exposed granite and glass-clad steel frame took over five years to build, and was praised upon opening by architectural critic Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian, who called it "at once highly theatrical and insistently subtle."[10]
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