Sunday, June 30, 2013

amps to 11

And since we're on the subject of audibility, singers at the Met (or anywhere else) wearing body mics for broadcasts and HDcasts seems sort of a given. Not sure why that rates an article. The concern is, and long has been, the wearing of mics when the only audience is in the house. And the way you tell whether that has happened is by doing a survey of NYT reviews for the last thirty years, and determining when (and how often) critics complained about inaudible singers and when they didn't.

7 comments:

  1. hmm, that might explained why i heard Damrau sooo well singing exquisite pianissimo , and i was curious at the time how she could afford to sing that and be heard in the house/recording...

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    1. I'm willing to bet that Damrau knows how to make that pianissimo completely audible everywhere in the house, mic or no mic.

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  2. But if we in the audience are hearing the singers amplified, where are the speakers?

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    1. I don't think we are hearing them amplified now. I've read enough critical comments about singers' inaudibility in the last few years that I'm inclined to take Gelb at his word when he says mics are only in use for broadcasts & HDs. Consider, for example, the first run of Rheingold, where Richard Croft sounded fabulous on Sirius but took a shelling at curtain calls, and that in a production where they could have plugged him into a Marshall stack and nobody would have noticed it in all the tech.

      But that's not to say that amplification hasn't been used in the not too distant past. And it wouldn't be hard to hide speakers, all you'd need is the right shade of dusty gold spraypaint. (Next time you enter the lobby, look up :-)

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    2. I will have to keep my eyes peeled! I'm glad it looks like they aren't using amplification now. One of the things I find so amazing about operatic singing is that they don't need microphones.

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  3. I think they would have used mics for Nixon in China. They did in Toronto. I was sat quite close to the mixing desk.

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    1. Indeed they did, and in fairness Tommasini points out that Adams favors amplifying singers for his operas. I figure contemporary opera gets a pass anyway, precisely because sound tech is now part of the compositional landscape.

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