1 August 2025
Homecoming
AYO Tour Blog
The fabulous firsts at the Sydney Opera House
“Flight QF59 to Tokyo, we will be commending boarding shortly”
Wait, Tokyo? Already?
I really am going back home…
It was only hours ago that I was celebrating with the AYO after our homecoming concert at the Sydney Opera House. I still have last night’s images whirling around my head; conductor David Robertson commanding the stage, hearing the audience call out for more, seeing my Mum for the first time in four months… our final concert certainly was a melting pot of emotions, but most of all, we, the Australian Youth Orchestra, showed the world we what can do. We were exhilarating.
But before our homecoming concert, we also had a final European concert in Berlin. The Haus des Rundfunks, the most ‘maze-like’ venue we played in, brought in a very enthusiastic audience. It was a wholesome end to the European leg of the tour and gave us the energy to push through the last few days.
We had a free day before we boarded our flights back to Sydney, so many of us went to the Sunday flea market (tip: withdraw cash at banks, because the Euronet ATMs will scam you), visited the Brandberg Gate and the Berlin Wall Memorial.
With our jetlag-prevention-plans in place, we boarded our flights and over 30 hours, made our way back to Sydney. Possibly on the list of my five top accomplishments this tour was learning how to sleep on a plane! Although, that only worked for the first long-haul flight; in the second one, we got rattled around like ragdolls for three hours straight. I think the musicians on the Singapore airline route definitely won the ‘most comfortable plane ride’. 😉
A 5am arrival for the British airways team
The next 30 hours were dedicated to recovering from jetlag, so some of us went straight to sleep when we arrived at the hotel, and some of us pushed through and managed to hard-reset their body clocks. Either way, all of us ‘locked in’ for our last concert – jetlagged or not, we were there to bring the Sydney Opera House down.
Everything we had been working towards in the last month exploded into a prismatic showcase of stories from around the world: William Barton’s sounds of country in Peter Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry, tales of tender love unravelled by Christian Li in Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor and shape-shifting scenes in Alice Chance’s Through Changing Landscapes. We sung Scheherazade’s stories for the last time and revelled in our conductor’s own encore piece, A Joyful Noise.
The tears couldn’t be controlled as we celebrated our final notes, the orchestra refusing to leave the stage as the concert ended, taking final photos. Like Warren said at the very beginning of the tour, ‘These next few weeks will probably be some of the best in your life’ – and I mean, I haven’t lived my whole life yet, but he was right. #warrenswisewords
So that’s it. The AYO’s first tour in six years done. We will be carrying this experience into the rest of our lives, and we are so grateful for your support. Thank you for tuning in.
~Julia Hill , Media and Communication Fellow 2025