Reshaping excellence

The first part of the concert presented works by John Adams, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Gy rgy Ligeti and Philip Glass, performed by the acclaimed Junge Deutsche Philharmonie orchestra. This is my second time working with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and it's the absolutely most exciting group in the world to work with, said conductor Jonathan Stockhammer. There is so much passion in every position that I can let a lot of the work come from the heart and I can let go and I love that feeling.

Towards the end of this first section, the orchestra was joined on stage by Imogen Heap, appearing in her only public concert of 2015. Her first song was a unique orchestral arrangement of her hit Can't take it in that had been specially created by Jonathan Stockhammer. This performance would be the debut for an incredible new version played especially for the appreciative audience.

After the intermission, Imogen Heap thrilled her fans with songs and compositions from her inspiring repertoire, MIDI-controlling sound effects, loops and delays (and also her creatures ) via her self-designed hi-tech gloves, which she had programmed extensively for this event. Jonathan Stockhammer: To watch her work, to see her develop her pieces - that's very composer-like. She does so much of the production and the arranging herself, she is really the master of it all. She is so amazingly talented with the programming aspects, the expression comes from her depth of knowledge. She's like a Debussy of the modern computer and these hand effects. Backed by musicians from the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Imogen also debuted a brand-new composition for the event, Tiny Human .

Tackling difficult acoustics - and bringing together different worlds

Sound designer and FOH engineer Oliver Voges described the complexity of the event from an audio perspective: We are actually bringing three completely different elements together. First there's the orchestra: they usually play live and are not used to getting amplified. Then we have Imogen and her band - their music and the many MIDI signals and effects need to be amplified of course. And last but not least, there's the 9.1 immersive audio recording taking place, and such recordings are normally made without any amplification happening at the same time, because you want to reproduce the actual hall and loudspeakers would interfere with the natural acoustics.

However, the acoustics of the impressive Great Hall actually turned out to be quite challenging, and ultimately the amplification via the PA system was the very thing that ensured a fantastic listening experience for the live audience and saved the 9.1 recording. A beautiful, large dome spans The Great Hall, and this feature created unpleasant audio reflections. Oliver Voges: It was a little bit like a whispering gallery, where you speak very quietly in one corner and hear your words very loud at the other end. This happened here and by chance it happened at the conductor's position. The biggest problems occurred with the woodwinds, as they project to the top, right into the dome. The reflected sound was much louder and had a total different timing than the direct sound.

To remedy the situation, Voges had to do a mix with his own room algorithms to mix the depth of the room back in. I have done an architectural mix in an electronic way. In a classical production you would usually do this with different kinds of mics and different kinds of pre-delays to delay the sound to the main array. But here we had no other choice than to do this electronically. Our goal was to keep the colouration of the sound 100% the same, no matter whether the PA is on or off - and we achieved this.

Controlled amplification

Oliver Voges introduced a minimal, controlled amplification that corrected the room effects, stacking the orchestra as on a recording while keeping the typical timbre of the instruments, thus recreating the depth of the room and of the instruments. In addition, Jonathan Stockhammer made some minor musical changes to cater for the room, and these joint efforts created a sound that was pleasant for the audience and ideal for the 9.1 recording.

The actual amplification of the orchestra started out at 0.8 dB above the natural level with the first piece by John Adams and was increased during the first half of the concert to about 1.5 dB to set the acoustical scene for Imogen Heap and the orchestra in the last piece before the intermission. Oliver Voges: By inaudibly increasing the amplification throughout part I, we avoided any acoustical gap, so the whole concert sounded a unified, homogeneous whole. During the rehearsals, we always checked back about the amplification with all parties involved - Is that OK with you? Does it distub you in any way?' Basically everything is linked - the orchestra is linked to Imogen, the FOH is linked to monitors and on top of that there's the link to the recording - we want to have a good show but also a very, very good recording. I think we have come up with a very good solution that does justice to all elements. After two rehearsal days, Gregor came up to me and said: 'Listen, if the PA is on, the recording sounds even better.' What more could you ask for?

Dante saves time, cabling and nerves!

The audio crew used a Dante network for the event. Oliver Voges explained, As there are two completely different set-ups for this event, we decided from the very beginning that we would have two different crews to handle each. We had a monitor and a front-of-house engineer for Imogen Heap, and we also had monitors and FOH for the orchestra. During rehearsals we found that we had to put out sums from the orchestra to Imogen's monitor engineer, and so on. There was a lot of linking that was unplanned. Luckily, we had placed the f

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