At the end of August, the city of Astrakhan in the southern Russia hosted an
impressive classical music event which gathered an audience of more than 5,000
people. Set Inside the old walls of the Astrakhan Kremlin, a stronghold fortress that
began construction in the 16th century, the Astrakhan State Theatre of Opera and
Ballet performed an open-air presentation of the famous opera, Prince Igor by
Alexander Borodin.
On the night of the performance, the central square of the Kremlin was transformed
into the seating area while the beautiful Cathedral of the Assumption and adjacent
buildings served as the stage backdrop. A temporary 40 x 20 m platform was
assembled for the orchestra at centre stage.
All sound equipment used for the performance, including Allen & Heath dLive mixing
consoles, a main K-array PA system, Audio-Technica microphones and wireless
systems and QSC stage monitors, were provided by Russia distributor MixArt.
“We worked previously with The Astrakhan Opera Theater on a few other projects
including the Delta Jazz Festival, the premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s Traviata and The
Damnation of Faust at The Moscow Bolshoi Theater, and they were extremely happy
with the results which are why they invited us to work with them again on this
project. We were able to rely on a similar setup of equipment to meet the challenging
conditions of an open-air opera performance,’ says Vadim Scherbakov, the head of
MixArt office in the South region and the chief sound engineer of the project at the
Astrakhan Kremlin.
The main PA system consisted of two line arrays of 6 Dragon-KX12 coaxial point
sources paired with 4 Thunder-KMT218 18′ subwoofers. Two Pinnacle-KR802 portable
systems were used as delay speakers, and two Pinnacle-KR102 systems were used as
front fills to ensure even coverage of the entire seating area.
“The sound quality surpassed all our expectations,’ says Scherbakov. “K-array
provided crystal clear and natural sound while being compact and almost invisible!
One of our major concerns was to make sure that the audience will hear true voices
vocalists, choir and orchestra instruments as if they were in the theatre with no sound
reinforcement and the K-array systems did more than help us meet that aim.’
