The Warehouse & Adamson kick start Edinburgh 2018
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This audio and visual event highlighted contemporary responses to the communication infrastructure of the First World War. The work was a joint commission for the BBC Proms, 14-18 NOW and the International Festival, in association with the Royal Albert Hall.
For the event, The Warehouse worked alongside International Festival’s head of sound Tom Zwitserlood, production manager Murray Boyd, and technical director John Robb, together with Olivier Award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry, who recently won the 2018 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
The Warehouse has worked with the International Festival for over 27 years. This year, for the first time at an opening event, The Warehouse provided an Adamson loudspeaker system. The system consisted of main left and right hangs of E15 line array loudspeakers, S10 front-fills, E119/S119 distributed sub bass, S10 front-fills and 6 x S10 per side on delay towers, all powered with Lab Gruppen PLM20K44 amplifiers running Lake processing on a Dante network. A Yamaha QL5 mixer together with Shure Axient radio mics and DPA microphones. The show sound was mixed by Gareth Fry with systems and RF looked after by Douglas Martin, Simon Meadows, Graeme Brown and Kieran Blair.
Five Telegrams followed in the footsteps of previous multimedia opening events The Harmonium Project, Deep Time and Bloom, and was every bit as ambitious and impressive in scale. The performance weaved together a newly commissioned orchestral score, projected digital artworks and live participation.
The event was a collaboration between composer Anna Meredith and Tony Award-winning artists 59 Productions who have been behind the International Festival’s three previous opening events.
The large scale multi-media brought together a symphony orchestra and youth chorus with illuminations and projections at the Usher Hall to officially open the International Festival.
Derek Blair, director of The Warehouse commented: “The Warehouse has an amazing 27-year history of working with the Edinburgh International Festival. Each opening event gets more and more spectacular! The vision and scale of ambition and innovation showcased in Five Telegrams was outstanding. For this special event the sound had to be equally spectacular, I think this was achieved very successfully with the Adamson system. The opening event always puts a huge spotlight on Edinburgh, it’s a world class event that we are so proud to be part of.”
(Jim Evans)
