As a preview to this year’s 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth in November, Ravenna Festival staged a trilogy of the composer’s most popular operas (Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata) in the city’s 19th century Alighieri Theatre. The ambitious project consisted of staging the three works, three times on three consecutive nights.
In addition to the design and logistic problems involved in producing such an event, the Verdi “marathon” (directed by Cristina Mazzavillani Muti, wife of world-famous conductor Riccardo Muti) involved a variety of original technical features: Il Trovatore had virtual scenography, with digital projections via a Christie 35K projector by visual designer Paolo Micciché and spatialized sound by electronic music pioneer Alvise Vidolin. La Traviata hosted 11 huge mobile mirrors reflecting/distorting performers and lighting. All three operas had an impressive array of microphones on stage, in the boxes, and hidden in the scenery to create the necessary effects and ensure sufficient vocal amplification, without any head-worn mics.
Roberto Mazzavillani, technical director of the Fondazione Ravenna Manifestazioni since 1997, explains, “The main difficulty in staging three operas simultaneously was the space at our disposal. The Alighieri doesn’t have a large scenery dock, fly loft with motorized fly system, or fixed lighting truss, and is only 16m [52'] high. Set design, therefore, exploited space to the utmost and Trovatore and Traviata had a lot of elements in common, although offering audiences different visual results.”
La Traviata and Il Trovatore were adaptations of 2008 and 2010 productions respectively, so LD Vincent Longuemare took his previous plots’ requirements into consideration when designing for Rigoletto, the entirely new production of the three, combining the key features of each in a “sort of large light puzzle, fitted together according to the show,” he says.
As well as 200 conventionals (a variety from Robert Juliat and ETC) and five Martin Professional Atomic strobes for the Rigoletto storm scene, Longuemare fielded 23 Clay Paky Alpha Profiles. “I’ve worked with these fixtures for years and chose them because I know them inside out so, with the two extraordinary programmers—Uria Comandini and Marco Rabiti—I was able to work fast,” he says. “I like to control every beam, every angle of incidence, impact on stage, and consequent reflections. I’ve reached the stage of even wanting to control the shadows and shades of gray on faces and costumes, like an etching.”
Adding to the issue of space on stage, time was also at a premium, and Longuemare notes that decisions had to be made fast, creating satisfactory images immediately, because he didn’t know if they would be able to go back and fine-tune them later. “In this case, the work I normally do in three stages was done in one and a half, so split-second concentration was fundamental,” he says.
After the event, working again on his design for Rigoletto before Ravenna Festival took it to Bahrain, he says, “We managed to design what I was aiming for: a look vaguely inspired by a mixture of Veronese, Vermeer, and Tiziano, without trying to reproduce atmospheres in an excessively pictorial manner but nevertheless creating lighting based on the rules of pictorial composition that were in fact moving three-dimensional cues that accompanied and often preceded performers’ movements. The biggest compliment I have received regarding this modus operandi was when they said I’d managed to make the music great.”
Massimo Carli of specialist audio contractor BH Audio, adds, “Fortunately, things were planned well in advance, with several meetings with Ms. Muti to see the sketches of the sets, understand which parts moved and which were fixed, and decide how far to go from an artistic point of view. The audio was by Alvise Vidolin, who ‘translated’ Ms. Muti’s artistic requests into technical details for us, as well as programmed the Max/MSP. At the operational stage, however, he left live audio control to BH, so I handled Rigoletto and La Traviata, and my brother, Andrea, handled Il Trovatore. We had very few rehearsals with singers actually singing, but we got extremely positive feedback for the results obtained.”
The Sounds Of Verdi
The audio control platform hosted an Avid Venue Profile console and an Apple Mac Pro running Cycling 74 Max/MSP and an Avid Digi 003 audio interface for the spatialization, with the Spaace patch created by Vidolin for Il Trovatore. In Rigoletto, another Vidolin patch automatically fed out effects, such as thunder.
Il Trovatore’s spatialized audio was on six channels, each fed out through a d&b audiotechnik T10 enclosure, mounted on the front of tier-3 boxes and used in the other operas for effects and reverb. Four d&b E8s were in the gods, aimed up toward the ceiling for reverb effects. Four more T10s were used stage-front left and right, and two d&b B1 subs for the impressive thunder in Rigoletto. Two d&b F1220s, and a B1 sub used for reverb and effects on stage were positioned differently for each opera.
As well as five Sennheiser MKH 416 P48U shotgun mics at the front of the stage to ensure frontal coverage of the singers, numerous other mics was deployed: five DPA 4088s with Shure UR1 transmitters and U4RD receivers were installed on parts of the scenery that were moved in Rigoletto and a wireless DPA 4060 was hidden in a stairway in Trovatore; two hard-wired DPA 4088s at the sides of two of La Traviata’s mirrors for particular effects; two DPA 4023s for coverage of a band and choruses off-stage; two more (flown from the grid) covering a string quintet on-stage in Rigoletto; an Electro-Voice RE 20 for a bass drum off-stage; eight Neumann KM 140s covering the chorus on stage (Il Trovatore); and ten Sennheiser MKE 2 Gold sub-miniature mics for the La Traviata chorus, performing in the side boxes.
Mazzavillani adds, “The trilogy’s technical team was undaunted by difficulties which, on paper, would have discouraged others, and can be rightly proud of the results achieved.”