Regarded as one of the most important cultural events in the Swiss calendar, the St Galler Festspiele is a three-week, open-air festival dedicated to classical music and dance. Its highlight is an open-air opera performance, set against the backdrop of the St Gallen Cathedral.
This year, the festival’s seventh, Berlioz’ La Damnation de Faust was the main event. The production required three complementary sound systems and used a Stagetracker FX real-time tracking system to localise sound to the performers’ movements.
Swiss A/V consultancy company Tingo took care of the sound design of the main stage outside the cathedral, with sound engineer and audio consultant Dani Niedermann taking on his regular role in the event.
‘I have been working on this festival since it was first inaugurated in 2006,’ he says. ‘We have been using a performer tracking system for the last four years, but this is the first time we have used a TTA system. I have to admit that I’m delighted with the results.’
The stage at St Gallen for this production was unusual in that it was asymmetrical and incorporated several different levels and gradients. It was also vast, measuring 35m wide by 15m deep, and completely open to the elements. ‘This was why it was so interesting to have a performer tracking system in place – it added an element to the sound that is completely unexpected in an open air environment and enabled us to deliver the best possible audio experience for the audience, even if the weather was a bit windy,’ Niedermann explains. ‘We had an audience capacity of 1,200, so it was appreciable to have the extra precision afforded to us by the TTA system.’
The first of used the three sound systems used for the production was a d&b audiotechnik V-Series line array in an LR configuration, which handled the 60-piece philharmonic orchestra seated under the stage. The second, for the tracking system for the four soloists, comprised eight d&b E12 cabinets flown across the front of the stage and a further six d&b E8s on a delay line (three per side through the seating auditorium). The third comprised six d&b Q7s and four E8s placed around the rear and sides of the audience handled surround sound/room acoustics to create a concert hall-like ambience.
‘The Stagetracker was at the heart of the whole system,’ Niedermann reports. ‘It was the element that gave coherency to the rest. We could, of course, have done it without the Stagetracker, but it wouldn’t have sounded as good, and now we’ve used it, we don’t want to go back.’
‘I can see the potential of the TTA system for a number of different applications,’ he adds. ‘Our theatre clients are very interested in the product for fixed installations, because the other interesting point about the Stagetracker system is that it’s not only about performer tracking – thanks to the delay matrix it’s also a fantastic tool for sound effects. Once the system is in place, you can send anything to anywhere in the room really quickly and easily. A traditional set-up would take up a lot of outputs on the desk and require some seriously complicated routing and patching to achieve the same thing. I’d take a Stagetracker FX system over that any day.’
More: www.tta-sound.com
More: www.dbaudio.com
More: www.tingo.ch
