The St Olav Drama, which unfolds in the last 24 hours before the battle, revealing the transition between paganism and Christianity, is the largest and oldest open-air play held in the Nordic countries, encompassing elements of theatre, drama, music, dance and storytelling. Providing an long-overdue improvement to the long-running drama's sound quality brought many challenges, with main engineer and sound producer Svenn Frøseth starting production preparations in early spring.
"The performance area and auditorium is huge, plus there was the challenge of mic-ing a symphony orchestra and large choir, and running 24 radio mic systems at the same time," says Frøseth. "Working with the symphony orchestra was particularly interesting; it was a great challenge to create a good sound image for 6,000 people. But with a lot of high quality microphones from DPA, this was possible. All 26 stringed instruments in the orchestra - violins, violas, cellos and double bass were fitted with a DPA 4061 miniature omnidirectional microphones using DPA's black rubber miniature mic holders, which the musicians were more than happy to attach to their instruments. For some of the other instruments, including oboes and flutes, we set up a total of five DPA 4011 cardioid mics.
The actors were fitted with DPA 4066 omnidirectional headband mics which Frøseth found to be flexible for mounting purposes and tough enough to handle the battle scenes without becoming dislodged - while sounding great too.
Frøseth has nothing but praise for local distributor Anders Faafeng at Lydsystemer for the great support he put behind the brand. And it wasn't just the professional audio contingent who were impressed by the increase in sound quality. Local newspaper Trønder Avisa wrote in its review: "Music and sound are very important for this play, and this year full justice has been done to the orchestra and choir. After 51 years the sound problem has been solved. You could hear every little sound from the violins everywhere in the amphitheatre. Never before has it sounded so beautiful, and neither have the choir and orchestra been heard at such high levels, all of which strongly contributed to making this the best play ever."
This year the festival had an extra-special visitor - King Harald of Norway. For his speech, a DPA 4011 was mounted onto a podium at the front of the amphitheatre. A total of 12 DPA 4061 miniatures were also used in the indoor amphitheatre which seats 1,000 and hosted smaller theatre productions during the 10-day festival.
(Lee Baldock)
