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Yamaha Rivage PM10 used for Ruhrtriennale opera

Running from August to October each year, the Ruhrtriennale international festival brings music, dance, theatre, performance and other arts together in the former industrial buildings of Germany’s Ruhr region. The festival’s focal point is the Jahrhunderthalle, a former boiler house for the Krupp steelworks in Bochum. Its acoustics provide many challenges for audio engineers, and this year a Yamaha Rivage PM10 console helped to tame the sound for the opera ‘Alceste’.

Technical director Will-Jan Pielage designed the audio system for ‘Alceste’. Supplied by Bergneustadt-based rental company Babbel & Haeger, the input count for the Rivage PM10 was around 40 channels. With the 900-capacity audience seated in an L-shape - higher on the short ‘leg’ of the L - the output side was more complex, using 27 outputs and all of the Rivage PM10’s 72 mix busses.

“To make the sound as natural as possible the most important thing was to localise the sources, which came from an orchestra, choir and vocal soloists. The stage was 45 m wide and 15 m deep, which made it a challenge to program the delay times for the soloists when they were moving towards the ends of it,” says Pielage. “We needed 18 mix busses for the orchestra, including two for subs below the audience. We used 42 more for the time alignment of the six stage positions for the seven soloists, 12 more for other positions and monitors and six auxiliaries. This pushed the console to its limit - in fact we needed to send some feeds direct to the matrixes.”

“All sources were time aligned. As the orchestra and choir didn’t move, we used fixed values on the ten speaker groups that were above the stage,” adds Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson, who mixed the performances. “For the seven singers we programmed the time alignment for their positions into the Rivage PM10 and recalled these via the Focus function, according to our notation on the score. Each recall updated the position of one singer, but did not affect anything else.”

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