Outdoor Metropolitan Opera Summer Concert in Prospect Park, and all New
York Philharmonic 'Concerts in the Parks' will feature that Indoor Sound
NEW YORK, June 18 -- Sound Associates, Inc., provides the
sound design for the 2008 outdoor Metropolitan Opera concert and all New
York Philharmonic outdoor summer concerts again this year. The free
concerts begin with the biggest outdoor live concert in Met history Friday,
June 20, on Prospect Park's Long Meadow, followed on Tuesday, June 24, by
the first of the New York Philharmonic's "Concerts in the Parks" on Central
Park's Great Lawn.
The Met concert features duets by Metropolitan Opera soprano Angela
Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna accompanied by the 30 voice Met Chorus
and 78 piece Orchestra performing the music of Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti,
Massenet and others. The production presented a unique challenge to Sound
Associates, Inc., to design the mammoth sound system to cover the huge
crowd of up to 150,000 people, aligned with six jumbo video screens.
http://www.soundassociates.com
"Our goal is to take the vastness of these large outdoor concerts and
make the performance feel as intimate as possible for the audience,
regardless of where they are seated," said Domonic Sack, sound designer and
Executive Vice President.
For the Met concert, this technical achievement requires syncing the
orchestra and voices with video screens placed throughout the park and
linking them to fourteen forty foot delay towers, placed high enough so the
audience can see beneath them, programmed with millisecond video and audio
delays which increase as they get farther from the stage.
With the coordination of the towers the echo is eliminated. No matter
where an audience member sits they'll be able to hear and see a seamless
live performance.
"We're essentially building an outdoor concert hall with the sound
system. We retain an acoustic sound for as many rows as possible before the
speaker system kicks in, and that acoustic feel continues throughout the
entire park so those further back get the acoustic experience of those
closer to the front," he said.
"The main requirement for all the concerts is that the audience be able
to concentrate on the immediacy of the live performance, unaware of a sound
system," said Sack, himself a lyric tenor who will be celebrating his 20th
year in the Met Extra Chorus performing in Gotterdammerung, part of the
2009 production of the Wagner Ring Cycle
Sound Associates, Inc. built a completely different front end sound
system for the for the New York Philharmonic free "Concerts in the Parks"
tour to all five boroughs, East Islip, Long Island and Holmdel, NJ. The
first concert, in Central Park on June 24, will feature music by
Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Sousa. All concerts are followed
by fireworks, no tickets are required. http://www.NYPhil.org
"The Central Park Philharmonic concerts are expected to attract forty
to fifty thousand people," said Sack, who is also currently designing the
sound for Broadway's A Tale of Two Cities.
The Met concert will be broadcast live on WQXR Radio at 96.3 FM, and
streamed on http://www.MetOpera.org
For over sixty years Sound Associates has been a leader in the world of
theater and professional sound and video design. With production facilities
in Yonkers, New York City and Atlanta, the Company has built sound systems
for over 1000 Broadway shows, live events and concerts including the Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade, civic installations, hearing rooms and houses of
worship. In October of 2005 Sound Associates, Inc. received the HHS
Secretary's Highest Achievement Award for their decades-long commitment to
making live theater more accessible to special needs audiences through
innovative use of technology.
Current Broadway productions built by Sound Associates, Inc.:
Passing Strange; Hairspray; The Lion King; August: Osage County;
Legally Blonde; Boeing Boeing; Thurgood; Macbeth; November; Xanadu; The
Little Mermaid.
Contact: Julie McQuain
212-477-0472
JMPRmedia@aol.com
See Also
