Stage-struck ... the newly refurbished auditorium. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Organisers of the 2007 Orange prize, lovely, generous people that you are, forgive me. I have a confession. I wangled a ticket to your very posh awards ceremony for the first time this year, drank lots of your free booze and tried to look reasonably interested throughout, but all the time I was harbouring a dark secret. I hadn't read a single book on the shortlist (still haven't). I'm not quite sure what I think about the ethics of the prize itself (still don't). I went for one reason, and one reason alone: because I'm in love with the Royal Festival Hall, and you happened to choose it as a venue.
Blagging freebies to an event when you have very little reason to be there, of course, is journalistically shameless and morally turpitudinous. But it was worth it to get inside, and when the building opens properly this weekend, I bet the thousands who'll take part in the opening festivities feel exactly the same. And, boy, does it look amazing - that vast white sail of a facade, the suave net-and-ball carpet throughout, the circulation spaces, uncluttered and clarified, swooping majestically through to the Thames. But it's inside the auditorium (I did a bit more blagging to sneak past the security guards and up the stairs) that you really notice the difference, all gleaming wood, glistening Robin Day lines and enough cream, red and gold trim to refit a royal yacht. It's difficult not to feel that, for the first time ever, the RFH is being given the chance to sing.
But of course the building itself, cosseting you from the noise and muddle of the city around, is silent- it's what happens inside that counts. Wandering around on Wednesday night, gleeful, dumbfounded and (perhaps a little bit) drunk, I thought of the favourite things I've seen there. The first time I stood inside, as a student, was for a show-stopping Mahler 5 with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, but I think my highlight was sitting on the stage as Maurizio Pollini snarled his way through Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata about eight feet from my chair. After he finished, the roar that went up from the audience was the kind of thing that throbs inside your chest for days. A rapid poll around the arts desk dredges up other memories - John Peel's Meltdown festival in 1998, a gorgeously noisy Kraftwerk in 2004, the unlikely picnicking-on-the-stairs that attends the Bach Choir's English-speaking Matthew Passions each Easter. We're sure there are plenty more - so, in tribute to the reopening of one of the best venues there is, tell us your own. And maybe see you there tomorrow.
