Orchestra pit -or- Orchestra room

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I can't imagine the actors being able to see a conductor in a pit either. Oftentimes they are lucky if they can see the floor five feet in front of them.

Which is why you always have a top special on the conductor or maestro.

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[kiwitechgirl]

Since this thread was last active, I've been through this again - a behemoth of an opera called Die tote Stadt which was so massive we couldn't get the orchestra in the pit, so we were in the Sydney Opera House Studio theatre, one of the smaller venues in the building. Same sound engineer as we had for Opera on Sydney Harbour, thank goodness, and even more technology. It was all close-mic'ed and I can't see how it would have worked any other way - general room mics will just not cut it. Somehow we did get away with non-CRT screens without a delay problem - although having said that, the conductor monitors in the theatre itself were CRTs, it was just the conductor's stage feed which was LCD/plasma or whatever (not sure what they were but they were flat screens). We found that we had to have a prompter in the orchestra pit (opera prompter, not a stage manager kind of prompter) in case it all turned pear shaped, which gave us an extra level of security in case we lost visual feed of the conductor at any time. In terms of sound, the whole thing was actually fed through the Opera House's recording studio desk as it is linked throughout the building (I think!) and then to the theatre. Singers were mic'ed, but only so the conductor could hear them - no amplification in the hall.

In a nutshell, it can be done, but it's complicated and expensive and you really need a genius of a sound engineer to get it right, plus a lot of gear. We were constantly on edge in case it turned ugly, but mercifully we got away with it and the end result was pretty amazing. However, we did have six orchestra-only rehearsals, two sitzproben, four stage orchestral rehearsals and a General rehearsal to get it right...below is a panorama of the Studio during one of the rehearsals, you'll notice one of the conductor's monitors isn't working, I'm not sure what had happened there! The chorus are also visible in the gallery.