Know-how

A New Broom Sweeps Clean

It is a tradition that the Concerto In Occasione Della Festa Nazionale della Repubblica is held in Rome on the eve of the Day of the Republic (i.e. June 2). The location of the event is the Quirinale, the highest of the seven »classical« hills of Rome where the President of Italy resides.

Broadcasting and sound reinforcement of this concert is always up to the Italian broadcasting service RAI. In 2000, four digital consumer desks were employed for this purpose, which then resulted in a disaster thanks to lacking reliability. The PA performance was so bad that the RAI had to accept an official protest letter. Its sender: Azeglio Ciampi, the Italian President himself!

Therefore, reliability was a must for this year's performance. And after the successful open-air playing of La Traviata, everything called for the equipment that had been utilized there: Nexus and Cantus.

There were some more sophisticated components to be employed beside the Stage Tec systems. For example, all instruments, the solo singers, and the choir were recorded using Schöps microphones, while the ambience was transmitted by a Neumann stereo microphone. An amusing fact: Two of the choir microphones failed due to a heavy shower occurring immediately before the start of the show; a short-circuit was caused by the phantom power that was already being applied to the condenser microphones, so the microphones could not be returned to operation.

However, the concert was performed (and broadcasted) even with just two choir microphones and (unlike the year before) was a huge success. And even the President was reportedly very satisfied.