NEW YORK CITY — After successful sold-out runs in Los Angeles and London, the multi-media celebration Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton held a weeklong run at the Avery Fisher Music Hall. The 2,700 seat venue is located in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is home to the New York Philharmonic.
Celebrating the collaboration of composer Elfman and filmmaker Burton, the event invited attendees wear costumes of their favorite film characters, with the orchestra and chorus performing in concert with visuals of Tim Burton’s original sketches, drawings, story boards, and film clips on the big screen above. The concert featured the Concert Chorale of New York with the Philharmonia Orchestra of New York. Renowned sound engineer Paul Bevan handled the FOH mix.
Sound was critical and an RCF TTL line array system was selected, with a left-right hang of 20 TTL33-A three-way line array modules with four TTS56-A double-21 subs. Four TT052-A cabinets provided stage lip fill with four TT08-A’s providing conductor and choir monitoring. The system was operated through RCF’s RDNet 2.2 software, which provided the house engineer both control and monitoring of the system in real time.
A principal issue was maintaining a natural orchestral sound at an elevated level than an acoustic presentation, especially in combining the orchestra with male and female choruses, vocal soloists, electronic keyboards and some pre-recorded tracks from original scores. “The Avery Fisher Hall is a world-class venue for orchestral music, although it presents many challenges for any kind of amplified show. When designing a suitable system for this project, RCF TTL line arrays were recommended to me by several people whose opinions I respect,” says Bevan.
“We had very little time for set-up and tuning the system,” he adds. “The cabinets went up quickly and easily in a venue that had never seen them before. The clarity and separation that I was able to achieve, given the many different textures, made mixing the show in an extremely reverberant hall much easier than I expected. The system integrated the various elements beautifully. Considering there were approximately 90 microphones in use throughout the orchestra and chorus, this is a testimony to the control that I was able to achieve, while maintaining a full and dynamic mix in the hall. I look forward to the next opportunity to use this system.”
