The culmination of the week-long festival was the Grand Finale concert which was streamed live on YouTube from Sydney Opera House. The Grand Finale was a multimedia extravaganza of music accompanied by extraordinary projections on the interior Concert Hall and the exterior sails of the Sydney Opera House.
Richard Neville of Mandylights was the lighting designer for the event and he opted for 51 VL5 Wash, 14 VL1000TS Spot, 26 VL3000 Spot and 230 Mandylights LED Tubes. Neville's brief was to create the equivalent of the MTV Awards for classical music.
"It needed to be spectacular but not a rock show," he commented. "At the same time we had to satisfy the normal requirements of a classical orchestra by ensuring they had enough light to be able to read music. We also had to consider the projection and design a rig that would fit in with that too. The rig had to be super low profile and we didn't have the option to put any trusses above the orchestra. We also couldn't get enough fixtures into the conventional side light ports at the Opera House and we were also very aware that we couldn't 'kill' many seats to accommodate lighting."
Consequently the Mandylights team created a design that consisted of two angled trusses that hug the walls all the way down the venue. This way the lighting is spectacular without obtruding or blocking any camera shots within the venue.
"I used heaps of VL5 washes as their quality of light is still not matched by any other fixture," said Neville. "Every colour is usable on the orchestra and every colour looks great. The zooms on the Vari*Lite VL3000 and VL1000 spots are fantastic. I used the Vari*Lite VL1000's to do lots of individual spots on the orchestra as well as a lot of the front and back light on host positions as they can change so quickly.
"Everything about the Vari*Lites is so reliable even the VL5 which is over 15 years old in age. The fact that only two fixtures out of fifty-one went down over the entire event is a credit to both Vari*Lite and Bytecraft."
As well as the Grand Final, the Mandylights team was involved in the lighting direction for all the live sites and the events in the week leading up to the main event.
YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 was the most watched live stream in YouTube's history beating the previous record from 2009 which was the live streaming of U2's 360 concert from Los Angeles. During the stream nearly 30m people logged on around the world.
(Jim Evans)
