Voted amongst the top ten best festivals in the world last year, the setting alone is something out of a fairy tale - the festival is in fact hosted by Gloria, Princess von Thurn und Taxis in the courtyard of her beautiful palace in Regensburg. In addition to performances of Verdi's opera Nabucco, Bernstein's musical West Side Story and the cult rhythm & Blues show, The Blues Brothers, the star of this year's show was the internationally famed opera singer, Elina Garanca. Engineer and tonmeister, Carsten Kümmel, was responsible for the sound design for this event, and he specified an Eclipse to handle FoH mixing duties, and some monitoring.
"The Thurn und Taxis Schloßfestpiele is a very high quality festival where the equipment has to meet the expectations of both technicians and artists. Our primary objective was to deliver sound which was as natural as possible, which in the first instance meant that we opted for a surround sound configuration," said Kümmel. "In huge productions like Nabucco which come with an enormous stage setup, the orchestra was situated in the palace ballroom. This generated a total of about 100 input signals and around 30 output signals, all of which was managed from the Eclipse without the need for a complex monitoring setup.
"The most important thing for me in this situation - apart from the sound of the console - is to keep this amount of signals organised without losing the general overview of what's going on. Here, the Eclipse's Smart Faders proved themselves to be indispensable in keeping everything clear and instantly accessible. It really is a very elegant solution. Besides that, the sound of this console is mindblasting.
"Another very useful feature of Eclipse is the integrated M.A.R.S. Multitrack Recording System," continued Kümmel. "For example, on the Elina Garanca concert it was extremely hot on stage, so we had to keep the soundcheck as short as possible. I quickly turned on the recording function and was able to do all the fine-tuning using a virtual soundcheck without the orchestra. And this works without having to set up an external computer and hard disk recording program - it's all onboard, which saves everyone a huge amount of time and effort."
(Jim Evans)
