The completely sold out event features six full-scale productions, each run two at a time in repertory for three weeks, and is promoted by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
This year's shows includes: The Merry Widow, Fedora, Manon Lescaut, Cosi Fan Tutte, Rigoletto and The Queen of Spades, all accompanied by the Grammy Award winning City of London Sinfonia.
The technical production is overseen and co-ordinated by the Council's operations manager Mike Harth, working closely with his team of technical staff including chief LX Gary Cooper, deputy chief LX Andreas Atkinson and master carpenter Brendan McEvoy.
HSL has supplied Opera Holland Park for the last four seasons, a job that's project managed for them by Sean McGlone in the office and James Ewart on site. "They give us excellent service and a great deal," comments Harth. Although effectively a dry hire, HSL sends a full crew to site, including a qualified electrician for the four week get-in and build period, starting in May.
A complete 830 capacity theatre and site infrastructure is constructed from scratch in this time - to the highest possible specifications - including backstage facilities and dressing rooms plus the stage, auditorium, picnic and public areas and front-of-house.
The site has its own challenges. The stage is built under a custom canopy roof, backing on to Holland House, a former Jacobean mansion, built in 1607 for Sir Walter Cope, Chancellor of the Exchequer to James I. The canopy has two structural points that are also used to fly the spine of the lighting rig mother grid - a carefully balanced network of trussing runs emanating from the centre and providing all the overhead lighting positions. There's also four side-stage booms per side for additional lighting positions.
HSL are supplying approximately 150 lamps - a mix of Source Fours and Source Four Zooms, PARs, fresnels plus Chroma Q scrollers for the FOH Source Fours to maximise their flexibility. This year there's also 12 moving lights - six Robe ColorSpot 1200 ATs and six Martin Professional Mac 600s. The lighting desk is a Strand 520.
The FOH lamps are refocused for each production, but can't be physically moved as they critically balance the mother grid and with the shows performed in rep, there's a limited amount of re-focus time available each night. Lighting needs to offer plenty of choice for the three LD's involved across the six different productions. Harth and his team sit down with HSL at the start of the season and discuss all the requirements. Some of Opera Holland Park's more specific lighting and technical production elements are flight-cased up at the end of each season and left stored at HSL until the next.
There's over 140 ways of LightProcessor Paradime dimming in 36-way touring racks, plus a separate dimmer dealing with all the site lighting. The latter includes festoons, sodiums and floods, utilised to light walkways and picnic areas as well as for more decorative elements like architectural lighting of the stone work and trees. HSL also supplies all cabling and mains.
Audio-wise, HSL has supplied six Community Solution Series 915 speakers, which are installed across the main trussing grid in the auditorium. These can be utilised for the show if conditions get challenging (e.g. heavy rain storms), but the operas are all sung without amplification and the orchestra plays acoustically, so the audio system is very much a back-up plan.
The Yamaha M2500 console does, however, run all the site announcements and the public address system, so has a vital role in the big picture. It's fully battery backed up to meet the licensing requirements, and all t
