Lawo in the mix for Percussive Planet Ensemble
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Both outside and inside the cathedral, Grubinger, the professor of percussion at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg and his ensemble delivered a combination of pop and classical music spanning the history of music. In addition to the audience on site, thousands of listeners followed the performance on TV, courtesy of a live broadcast by Austria’s public station ORF2. Lawo mc² mixing consoles were used for both the FOH mix and the audio mix for the telecast.
The 20 musicians of the Percussive Planet Ensemble - nine horns, bass, guitar, drums, keyboard, piano, five percussionists and Grubinger himself - used 80 channels, which were connected via a Lawo stagebox to a 40-fader mc²36 as the FOH console and to an mc²66 in the TVN OB truck. For this purpose, the instruments, picked up mainly with Schoeps microphones, were connected to a DALLIS rack with 96 inputs as well as 16 analogue and 16 AES outputs using 150m of fibre cabling.
Inside the cathedral, 30 channels were used for the performance by the children's choir and a smaller version of the ensemble. The related microphones were connected to a Lawo Compact I/O stagebox. The mc²36 console was connected via Ravenna and two MADI lines in one-to-one signal patch-through fashion. The monitor split went via Rmio MADI/Dante converters to a Yamaha mixer and to the mc²66 in TVN’s OB truck.
"These kinds of mixes require an extremely high resolution and the cleanest possible signal paths inside the mixer as well as Schoeps microphones for maximum transparency. As far as capturing the dynamics of this ensemble is concerned, Lawo consoles win hands down,” says David Horn, who not only provided the Lawo mc²36 and other equipment as a rental contractor, but also acted as sound engineer at the Linz concert. He stood in for Martin Grubinger's regular sound engineer, Till Helfrich, who had specified the Lawo mc²36 for this tour.
"Performances by Martin Grubinger and his Percussive Planet Ensemble are always spectacular in several respects. On the one hand, there is the enthusiasm for playful perfection on stage. On the other, the versatility of percussion instruments is second to none. Last season we learned that a performance can involve up to 500 different percussion instruments. This not only requires large stages, but also flexible and powerful technology,” explains Helfrich.
There are several “instrument islands” on stage, which are played alternately, depending on the composition. It also happens regularly that musicians switch from one position to another during a piece, sometimes even repeatedly.
"Grubinger and the Percussive Planet Ensemble attach great importance, both musically and technically, to the highest degree of precision and dynamics. For sound reinforcement, this means that a high-quality signal chain, from the microphones to the mixing console, to the loudspeakers, is necessary to reproduce the sometimes delicate sound events on stage," says Till Helfrich.
Linz-based M3 Veranstaltungstechnik provided the sound for the event. Daniel Mateijka from ZDF oversaw the sound production in the TVN OB truck as music recording manager. The mc²66 audio production console installed in the TVN OB truck for the recording and broadcast of the concert was operated by Georg Burdicek from Vienna. The production concept was developed in close collaboration with production manager Martin Wessel from Hamburg-based concert- and tour management company backlight! in Hamburg.
(Jim Evans)
