2010 marked the 41st season of the play, with 2000 villagers dedicating a year of their lives to the project - none of whom are professional thespians - culminating in 105 performances (plus five public previews) between May and October. Each performance lasted for eight hours, including a three-hour interval.
"In the past, the audience had to resort to reading along in a text book to follow the dialogue," says Michael Kennedy, the 2010 play's sound engineer. "A number of those involved in were sceptical about using sound reinforcement for the first time, taking the view that the play had been 'fine' without it for over 300 years.
"But the aim was to make the use of audio technology as unobtrusive and subtle as possible. We had the greatest respect for the play's history and even the sceptics were won over by the time the first performance took place."
Supplied by the Munich branch of event production company Neumann&Mueller Event Technology, this year's production featured a Yamaha PM5D with two MY16EX and one MY16MD64 MADI interface cards. Other Yamaha equipment included 13 P4500 power amplifiers and two pairs of MSP5 powered monitors.
"The play is a sequence of acted scenes, which are opened, closed and punctuated by segments of narration and music from the orchestra, a 60-piece choir and soloists," says Kennedy.
"Realising an 'invisible' sound reinforcement system for a 40m wide stage that maintained the perceived acoustic source for whichever actor was speaking and providing good speech intelligibility to the back row of seats, 60m from the stage, was a major challenge."
(Jim Evans)
