More than a decade after Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman ordered the building of an opera house, the project is complete. The Royal Opera House Muscat (ROHM), now stands in the Shati-Al-Qurm district of the city as Oman’s premier venue for musical arts and culture.
Directed by legendary Italian TV and film director Franco Zeffirelli (who also designed the set) and conducted by Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, a lavish production of Turandot marked the 1,000-seat venue’s opening. Approximately 350 Italian performers were flown in on order of the Sultan, to create a musical night to remember.
At the beginning of the build, a team of 30 carpenters built a 1:5 scale model of the Sultan’s vision – which was regularly subject to change. Originally, the venue was to be known as the House of Musical Art, designed for orchestral and theatre productions, but it was decided that opera was to take priority.
Key to its technical system, local installer, Mustafa Sultan Enterprises, used five MediaMatrix Nion n3s for ROHM – two for the show relay system, and three for general production audio feeds.
‘The system needed to be absolutely discreet for the user, so we put two Nions in to deal with show relay, feeding audio to the dressing room speakers and back of house, plus taking audio and putting it back out for recording – and another three Nions to route all the various production audio feeds round to the various speakers and processors in the theatre,’ explains Richard Northwood of COMS,
an independent consultant who helped with the programming and design of the installation.’ It’s an integral part of the audio system, but entirely invisible, of course.’
The Nions send signal to all 70 of the auditorium’s loudspeakers, using its fixed presets.
‘Because the venue is meant for live sound, you tend to shy away from automation, so the Nion’s fixed presets do just what I want them to,’ he adds. ‘They are operated from a touchpanel, then everything else is done live on the mixer. In a theatre environment, everything has to patch around and change because you don’t know what show’s coming in next – that’s why the Nions are such an important part of the installation.’
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