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Opera Comes to the Arena, Bocelli's 1st N.American Tour
By Charles Conte A young tenor from rural Tuscany, blind from the age of 12, nonetheless earns a law degree and begins a remarkable career playing in piano bars to pay for his singing tuition fees that leads him in five years to international stardom as both a pop interpreter and operatic recital artist. Though it may sound more like a plot summary for a Mario Lanza vehicle from the early '50's, this is not a movie. It is the story of Andrea Bocelli, now one of the biggest selling artists in Europe. In the US, the broadcast of this December 1997 "Concert in Tuscany" became a PBS blockbuster, and his 1996 "Romanza" album - featuring the pop power ballad, "Con Te Partiró" - sold over 2 million copies, an incredible figure for an album in this country, without a word of English. Bocelli's first North American tour (the first leg of which began in July of this year) has been hugely successful - but not without its challenges. For opera lovers - and opera critics - the true test of an operatic voice is hearing the artist in live performance... Is the "smallness" that some perceive as characteristic of Bocelli's voice bolstered by studio acoustic tricks? Will amplification attempt to cover the deficiencies of the voice in the live setting, or will it overwhelm its warmth and depth? Will the arias and the tenor survive both the microphone and such unlikely settings for operatic/orchestral music as the National Car Rental Center in Ft. Lauderdale, FL? Other than the singer himself, these challenges fall most heavily on one man: the sound designer for Bocelli's North American tour, Alexander "Thorny" Yuill-Thornton II, principal of Solstice Company of San Rafael, CA. For the past 15 years, Thorny has worked in the unusual area of sound design for large scale classical music. For the Bocelli tour, he spec'd the system, helped choose the sound company, and traveled with the tour (July and August), making adjustments in each venue - venues that have probably never heard a single syllable of Italian rebound off their walls, ceilings, and floors. Thorny uses very little outboard gear in the tour's sound system: "I brought some just in case," he said, "but we're only using a Lexicon 480L, no limiters, nothing else." However, he adds, he's a, "heavy user of matrices, and they're integral to my designs, so each subsystem gets its own EQ." "Because it was an arena tour, one day in and out, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so my choice was a center cluster [two Meyer PSW-6 subwoofers over an array of four MSL-5's] with two side systems because we play 270 degrees often, stage left and right [two arrays of four Meyer MSL-3's with an array of three UPA-1's as down fills]." "I am most comfortable with the high-end Meyer systems for classical events. I've had more experience with Meyer's traditional large concert systems, but I am just now getting familiar with the self-powered loudspeakers. The new PSW-6 subwoofer is a unique tool that will become a part of my tool box in a big way. Secondly, I've found that the consistency of Meyer systems from different suppliers, is very high. Consistency from unit to unit is a very important issue for me. With Meyer product, I know that I don't have to worry about learning a system, regardless of the supplier. It seems to me that Meyer is almost unique in the effort they put forth in turning out uniform product."
Sound Company: Meyer loudspeakers: Down Fill: Side Systems: November, 1998 |
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