Held against the impressive backdrop of the Kazan Agriculturalists Palace, thousands of spectators braved the rain to enjoy what turned out to be a wonderful event, despite the inclement weather conditions. Innovason distributor Imlight (who also have a rental division) were charged with handling the AV requirements. At the heart of the PA system was an Eclipse GT digital mixing console handling the FoH mix.
FoH engineer Vladimir Ryabenko, who was employed at the behest of conductor Alexander Sladkovsky to mix the orchestra, first came across the Eclipse in at the recent Szgezed festival in Hungary, where he also met engineer and Tonmeister Carsten Kümmel.
Kümmel has been working closely with Innovason consoles over the last couple of years and was responsible (along with Innovason's Hervé de Caro) for the development of the new Pandors panning facility on the Eclipse GT. Ryabenko was particularly impressed by the Pandora function and wished to deploy it for the Kazan festival. Imlight therefore turned to Kümmel to come and set up the console, including Pandora, for Ryabenko in Kazan.
"Vladimir asked for a pretty complex setup," explained Kümmel. "We had 44 channels plus effects (which Vladimir managed from his PC using Altiverb), with delay on all the channels to make the sound as realistic as possible, and parallel compression on the strings. We also had to interface the Eclipse with a second console being used by Roberto Alagna's engineer to mix the two vocal mics of the soloists. These signals were then sent to the Eclipse to be mixed with the orchestra. We then applied Pandora to the full mix to open up the stereo image so that the members of the audience could hear everything perfectly, no matter where they were seated."
However, once the setup was completed, Kümmel was able to take a welcome back seat in order to relax and enjoy the show. "I thoroughly enjoyed it," he confirmed. "This was Vladimir's first time on the Eclipse, but he got to grips with it very quickly so I was able to leave all the mixing to him."
(Jim Evans)
