City Recital Hall

City Recital Hall — Sydney’s chamber music venue

City Recital Hall sits at Angel Place in the Sydney CBD, a five-minute walk from Wynyard Station and ten minutes from Martin Place. The building opened in 1999 as a purpose-built chamber music venue and is the principal Sydney home of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Musica Viva Australia‘s Sydney subscription series. The 1,200-seat hall is acoustically dry and well-suited to string-ensemble and chamber-music repertoire — the ACO’s home for its Sydney subscription concerts is one of the country’s most distinctive concert experiences.

The room

1,200 seats across stalls and circle. Front-half stalls give the most direct sound; circle middle gives a balanced overview. The room’s depth is greater than the Melbourne Recital Centre, but the acoustic shaping handles the additional volume well. The choir stalls behind the performers are the cheapest reliable seats and give a player’s-eye perspective.

Getting there

Walk from Wynyard Station (5 min), Martin Place Station (10 min), or any CBD hotel. Pre-show dining at Angel Place restaurants — Tetsuya’s, Felix, Bambini Trust are all within walking distance. The Angel Place laneway has been progressively redeveloped over the past decade; the post-show dining around the venue has improved substantially.