Ayrton Ghibli makes its debut at Garsington Opera posted: 06/11/2018
Garsington Opera 2018 Soraya Mafi (Nannetta) with the Garsington Opera Chorus
As autumn fades into early winter, Ayrton delights in looking back over a successful summer when its new Ghibli LED spot luminaire made its opera debut at one of the UK's most prestigious events, Garsington Opera Festival.
Founded in 1989, the annual Garsington Opera Festival takes place over seven weeks in June and July at the Wormsley Estate, home of the Getty family, amid the beautiful natural setting of the Buckinghamshire countryside. The atmosphere is quintessentially English as patrons are encouraged to arrive early to enjoy the gardens and deer park in advance of the performance, and picnic by the lake or dine in the marquee during the extended dinner interval between acts.
Garsington Opera is renowned for the quality of its productions, and engages the very best performers and musicians from around the world. It is important, therefore, to match this quality of performance with the quality of the production and equipment.
The aim therefore was to replace some lighting fixtures with those which made less noise during the finely tuned performances, something they were particularly keen to achieve given the peaceful surroundings. Technical Manager, Stephen Hawkins and his production electrician, Sam Floyd, began actively looking for quieter models and joined forces with lighting designers Malcolm Rippeth and Mark Jonathan to find a solution. It was essential we had a quiet moving light as the acoustic at Garsington is vibrant and we needed to reduce fan noise, says Jonathan.
We talked to several major manufacturers before settling on a few close contenders, says Rippeth. White Light organised shoot-outs at their premises and again at the Royal Opera House for us to make detailed comparisons. Our main criteria were that the replacement not only had to be quieter than the existing fixtures, but must be equally as bright without losing any of the features.
The result of shoot-outs showed Ayrton's Ghibli to be the best in several categories: brightness, quality of the beam and of course, noise reduction, and succeeded in winning over Jonathan and Rippeth who were lighting this year's productions.
Die Zauberflote 2018 Benjamin Hulett (Tamino)
Rippeth designed for three of the four operas in this year's programme: Strauss's Capriccio, Verdi's Falstaff, which earned him a nomination for a Knight of Illumination Award, and Garsington's first ever world-premiere, The Skating Rink, a new work by leading British composer David Sawer and award-winning librettist Rory Mullarkey.
Garsington Opera performs in a 600-seat pavilion lined with large glass windows on both sides, so any lighting design contends with huge amounts of daylight before the long dinner interval, and then moves into darkening and fully-dark conditions as the performance progresses, he explains. Any lighting fixture therefore has to be bright enough to register in full daylight, but versatile enough to cope with the changing conditions throughout.
Our tests showed Ghibli to be a really impressive fixture - brighter than anything else on the market, really very quiet, and with the best zoom range. The shuttering is beautiful with a range that takes it right to the very edge. It gives a good soft beam, the colour mix is smooth right across the beam and, considering its lightsource, produces a pretty good tungsten. It was just the right fixture.
White Light supplied 24 Ghibli fixtures for the season where they became the workhorse of the rig, hung from proscenium to the back of the stage from where they were used mainly as back light and three-quarter back light. The four operas play in rep so the Ghibli had to be adaptable to fit all our purposes, confirms Rippeth. They fitted in well with the other fixtures and were completely reliable throughout.
Lighting programmer, Dan Street, worked closely with the internationally renowned lighting designer Mark Jonathan on the fourth opera of the season, Mozart's last opera, Die Zauberfl te. He also had some positive experiences with Ghibli: The unit is very quick and accurate with a good range of zoom and focus to suit a range of applications, he says. It's brilliantly quiet in terms of heat control and operation, and with virtually no audible noise to the audience which was essential for use at Garsington.
It has a great back-end colour temperature, which is nice, and is flat across the beam, very bright and with a nice crisp white that makes it punchy, even on top of discharge fixtures and up against the daylight we faced.
There is a good selection of colours on the colour wheel and smooth colour mixing on the CMY and CTO wheels. The dichroic mixes on the CMY are an excellent hue enabling a good control of the overall saturation. The animation wheel and effects within the Ghibli give a solid range of options with the right gobo load.
The dimming is also very good with an excellent fine range at the lower end leading to smooth fade ins and outs.
Ayrton's Ghibli came along at just the right time, concludes White Light's technical director, Dave Isherwood. Ayrton has a growing reputation for performance and reliability, so when we saw what the Ghibli could do during the shoot-out, we were happy to invest in a number of them for our rental stock. Garsington Opera has been their first outing and they did not disappoint. They were 100% reliable with no swap-outs for the whole seven weeks. The prep team reported them easy to work with and were impressed with their build quality. Ghibli has been a big success and have been in steady use ever since on corporate events and in television studios with demand for them continuing to grow.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
13/05/2026
New Adobe Premiere Color Grading Mode Accelerated on NVIDIA GPUs
Joel Pennington May 13, 2026
0 Comments
New NVIDIA RTX-accelerated features streamlin...
13/05/2026
Grass Valley announced that dB Broadcast has delivered new IP-based outside broadcast (OB) trucks for Cloudbass, featuring Grass Valley LDX 100 Series cameras a...
13/05/2026
Ikegami will exhibit the latest additions to its wide range of broadcast production cameras, control units, viewfinders and monitors on stand 5D3-1 at Broadcast...
13/05/2026
FISE, working with the founding members of the XR Sports Alliance (XRSA), Accedo, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and HBS, have collaborated to develop an immersive...
13/05/2026
Canon Unveils New EOS R6 V Full-Frame EOS Camera and RF20-50mm F4 L IS USM PZ Bu...
13/05/2026
Boston Conservatory at Berklee Honors Beth Morrison and Moses Pendleton at Comme...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/05/2026
Creative software developer Foundry today announced the latest developments on Nuke Stage. A purpose-built application for end-to-end virtual production and in-...
13/05/2026
A definitive portrait of one of Ireland's most influential musicians
New TV documentary airs Monday 18 May on RT One and RT Player at 9.35pm
Watch the...
13/05/2026
Agentic AI is changing the way users get work done. Following the success of OpenClaw, the community is embracing new open source agentic frameworks. The latest...
13/05/2026
Reinforcement-learning agents - AI systems that learn by trial and error - can c...
12/05/2026
Beyond the Hype: A Strategic Post-Hoc Analysis of NAB 2026 If NAB Show 2026 had an underlying theme, it was a quiet, industry-wide pivot from the high-energy sp...
12/05/2026
Guntermann and Drunck (G&D), a Panoptec Technologies Group company, and CT Square, led by Chandresh Shah, have announced a joint venture to distribute G&D and V...
12/05/2026
With 30 days until the start of the FIFA World Cup 2026, Telemundo, the exclusive Spanish-language home of the tournament in the United States, has announced th...
12/05/2026
The NHL has announced the return of Stanley Pup for its third consecutive year, a 90-minute special featuring adoptable rescue dogs competing on a miniature rin...
12/05/2026
NBCUniversal presented its 2026 Upfront to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall, detailing upcoming programming across NBC, Peacock, Bravo, and Versant properti...
12/05/2026
FOX Sports has announced funding for the Fandom and Social Connection Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Publ...
12/05/2026
TNDV and Live Media, both divisions of Live Media Group, supported live broadcast coverage around NCAA Final Four weekend in Indianapolis, including the March M...
12/05/2026
The European Football Alliance (EFA) has announced a content distribution agreement with Fubo Sports Network, the free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel ...
12/05/2026
For the first time, Spanish-speaking fans in the U.S. will have two separate tel...
12/05/2026
CP Communications led a comprehensive spectrum management initiative on behalf of Churchill Downs during Kentucky Derby week, coordinating RF assets across the ...
12/05/2026
LiveU has announced a strategic partnership with DRONERESPONDERS, a 501(c)3 non-...
12/05/2026
Open Broadcast Systems has announced that BMC TV, a specialist in IP transport of broadcast content, has selected the Open Broadcast Systems 5G Flyaway solution...
12/05/2026
NEP Europe, part of NEP Group, has announced it will deliver broadcast solutions...
12/05/2026
Grass Valley has announced continued collaboration with Ravensbourne University ...
12/05/2026
Stats Perform has announced the launch of Opta Pulse, an AI-assisted video creation and distribution platform for leagues, rights holders, and broadcasters. The...
12/05/2026
FOX Sports has announced a collaboration with Sesame Workshop to integrate Sesame Street characters into FOX Sports' FIFA World Cup 2026 programming. Conten...
12/05/2026
To date, NHL Productions has produced 19 broadcasts with commentary in American Sign Language
NHL in ASL (American Sign Language) may be just one show, but the...
12/05/2026
Google's Brian Albert: creators, athletes, highlights, nostalgia, second-scr...
12/05/2026
A still from Past Lives by Celine Song, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | p...
12/05/2026
Spotify is where fans and artists come together, turning discovery into somethin...
12/05/2026
Features patented Marco-MMC clocking technology
Black Lion Audio's latest release combines the company's expertise in clocking with their renowned p...
12/05/2026
New Track Panel, sequencer upgrades & more
Following their recent public beta release, Reason Studios have announced the full release of Reason 14. With the...
12/05/2026
One month to go! SBS reveals expansive FIFA World Cup 2026 lineup beyond the pi...
12/05/2026
Rohde & Schwarz presents its advanced solutions for power electronics testing at...
12/05/2026
aconnic AG (ISIN: DE000A0LBKW6), Munich, has developed a modified fund raising p...
12/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/05/2026
Tyrell Corporation, specialists in high-end live sports and entertainment broadcasts, was tasked with delivering compelling broadcast coverage of premier equest...
12/05/2026
Registration is now open for IBC2026 as the global media, entertainment and technology community prepares to converge on the RAI Amsterdam from 11 14 September ...
12/05/2026
Ross Video, a global leader in live video production technology, will present its latest innovations and integrated production workflows at BroadcastAsia 2026, ...
12/05/2026
500 selected leaders from around the world across start-ups, corporates, and venture capital. Over 50bn in assets under management among attending investors, a...
Ayrton Ghibli makes its debut at Garsington Opera posted: 06/11/2018 
