After months of absolute silence as regards live music, on Saturday 9 July on the occasion of the Napoli Teatro Festival, I had the honor of collaborating in the event “La Mistica del Cosmo”, recording the vocal lines necessary for the show in the studio.
This is a multifaceted event based on Magnificat di Christopher Caresana, kept in the archive of French National Library in Paris and never recorded, interspersed with moments of lyric, dance and Live electronics, which has seen significant artistic realities involved starting from Artistic Director and Mezzosoprano Raffaella Ambrosino, passing through theVocal Orchestra Prime Numbers direct from M ° Alessandro Tino, present only virtually, which he performed at the Trees Music Studio of Cava de'Tirreni le 16 entries of the Magnificat, up to theEnsamble Ivir Dance directed by Irma Cardano as regards the choreography and the four musicians on stage (violin, viola da gamba, flute and harpsichord). The staff was in charge of the technical advice Midiware who, together with the undoubted quality of the artists present, showed live some of the best products in the catalog.
Precisely the union of all these resources has made it possible to create a show that is interesting from both an artistic and a technical point of view.
To understand some choices, we need to make a small premise. In fact, the basic idea of the organizers was to perform the Magnificat, a 16-voice choral piece of 24 minutes, with the entire Live Vocal Orchestra but due to the current restrictions it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to have all these people on stage and so we came to the conclusion of recording the 16 individual voices in the studio and reproposing them live through a system of Genelec speakers located on the stage, as if to make us imagine the presence of the various singers.
Moving on to the purely technical aspect of the event, there were four Genelec monitors of the line on stage The Ones (8351B on the sides and 8341A in the center), which as we have said spread the 16 voices divided into 4 sections.
The microphones used to amplify the instruments on stage were respectively:
*Violin - Earthworks TC25
*Flutes - sE Electronics sE8
*viola da gamba - Warm Audio WA-84 *Harpsichord - Earthworks TC 25
In addition there were a pair of microphones Earthworks QTC 40 matched pairs in front of the stage, which in addition to recording the noises of the scene and the dance steps, had a crucial role in the creation of the multimedia material that will be produced at a later time.
All of these microphones were amplified with the 8 channel preamp Rupert Neve RMP-D8 which directly converted the signals into Dante, thus sending them to the hall mixer (a Yamaha TF series). In the same network, a iMac equipped with interface RME Digiface Dante it was used to distribute the choral sequences of the Magnificat to the Genelecs on stage and to send the various references to the musicians in order to facilitate their synchrony during their performance.
In addition, the microphone signals were taken from the same network and recorded using live for the first time LUNA Recording System, the new DAW made by Universal Audio, which for the occasion rested on one UniversalAudio x6 connected to a Macbook Pro.
There was also an RME backup system, through the DUREC function of RME UFX II, stand alone system that allows the recording of the card inputs directly on USB drive, which fortunately was not necessary as LUNA performed its duty perfectly without any hitch.
Vincenzo Siani
