The 337m ($442m) building has already been the subject of controversy, the architect complaining about "architectural compromises" he had to make when McKinney Møller demanded that the building be changed to incorporate his ideas. Despite that, the public seems to have taken the building to their hearts, with all opera and dance performances for the coming season completely sold out.
At the heart of the venue is the main stage, with seating for an audience of nearly 1,500. Alongside this are five adjacent stages constructed in a modular design enabling sets to be moved on and off the stage as required. There's also Takkelloftet (which literally means rigging loft, but ship rigging rather than theatre!), an experimental theatre seating 200 people. The building houses over 1,000 rooms, including several rehearsal rooms for the opera and ballet and a large orchestral rehearsal room. As befits a building on which no expense has been spared (the ceiling of the main auditorium is adorned with 105,000 sheets of 24 carat gold leaf), Copenhagen Opera House has one of the most advanced theatre lighting installations to date, specified by UK consultants Theatreplan. The decision was taken to use distributed sine wave dimming for lighting over the stage virtually eliminating harmonic distortion. This means no noise from lamp filaments, no dimmer noise and no cable hum - an acoustician's dream. It also allows efficient distribution of power to the overstage lighting frames. IES of the Netherlands, now part of ETC, was selected to provide the sine wave dimming, enabling dimmers to be located where they're needed, in the vicinity of the luminaires. Cost benefits ensue from not having to install load wiring to dimmer cabinets, but using simple, efficient power mains distribution instead. Also, the dimmers are self-contained and more can be added if required.
Having made the decision to use the distributed sine wave dimmers overstage, Theatreplan moved to the task of specifying the installed dimming and control equipment. Following competitive tenders and interviews with several manufacturers, the consultants working with the users, Det Kongelige Teater, selected ETC to provide the remaining dimmers and a fully integrated lighting and control system, which had to be compatible with the IES dimming. Copenhagen Opera House boasts 1008 channels of ETC Sensor CEM+ dimming, plus 300 channels of IES sine wave dimming and 120 channels of IES switch bars, and is one of the first installations where the two forms of dimming have been used side by side. Although a pure coincidence that IES equipment was specified alongside that of ETC, it was while working on the project that the two companies held their first merger talks.
The complete system is networked using ETC's ETCNet2, which allows separate lighting control systems to operate, share and prioritise control on a single network. House light control is provided by an ETC Emphasis 2D 1000 channel system, while an Emphasis 2D 5000 channel system provides a snapshot of the rehearsal lighting over 10 DMX universes on Ethernet. An ETC Unison architectural processor is used to control the foyer and outdoor lighting. ETCNet2 provides over 32,000 EDMX addresses and v4 offers new facilities such as DMX merging and advanced patch features. Using ETCNet2 native devices such as Emphasis control and Sensor dimming enables the integration of architectural and entertainment systems, while ETC's unique protocols allow separate lighting control systems to operate, share and prioritise control on a single network.
Copenhagen is not the only venue to choose ETCNet2 - other recen
