In the last few months I received two offers to light a symphony. I thought to myself, “How hard can this be? Set a pretty look for each segment and key light a couple of solos. Simple, right?” Now add some flamenco dancers, jugglers, acrobats, assorted guest vocalists and 100 choir members. What I ended up with is a variety show, featuring the symphony.
In October I headed to Miami to light the grand opening of the new Carnival Symphony Hall. Michael Ledesma, my partner in Visual Ventures Design, was contracted to light this gala event and took me along to program the lights while he dealt with the politics. The program would consist of the symphony playing some arrangements by themselves, then serving as the backing band for an assortment of Miami native musicians.
The building was designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli. The interior of the hall was constructed of light-colored wood. The architecture of this room was a lighting designers dream to illuminate. There were several different textures of wood located around the orchestra area that we could treat as set pieces. Twelve feet above and directly behind the stage were three tiers of box seats that surrounded the entire symphony. Each had beautiful coves behind the seats on which we could splash light. The bottom tier behind the symphony would hold the choir.
The house lighting system was cleverly designed by Fisher Dachs Associates. They had 156 Vari*Lite VL1000 fixtures in a series of concentric rings. I imagine these fixtures were specified for this particular hall because they are silent and have a tungsten lamp source. The rings were adjustable in height. We wanted to showcase the entire room, so we chose to trim the lights high, approximately 50 feet over the stage. That’s a pretty steep throw for a non-arc light, but because of the amount of fixtures in house, we had almost enough fire power, but nothing for glitz. Face it; VL1000s are like driving a boat compared to a car. They both get you there, but a boat takes a bit longer than you would like and the ride is definitely not as smooth.
One of the hosts for the show was Emilio Estefan. His wife Gloria would be serenading the crowd at times during the performance. Emilio consulted with Mike, and they decided to bring in additional moving light fixtures to spice up the hot musical numbers and add some depth to the whole lighting rig. Paradigm lighting was called to supply an additional package of VL3000s and Martin MAC 2000 Wash lights. These fixtures were rigged to railings on different tiers behind the orchestra. The hard-edge fixtures would light the talent while the wash fixtures were used to illuminate the coves behind the box seats and the ceiling of the symphony hall.
When I do shows of this magnitude, I assign certain functions to particular groups of lights. Mike designated 40 of the VL1Ks as the orchestra wash while another 40 would work the apron of the stage and backlight any talent playing there. Another group was designated to light the building structure while the remaining fixtures lit the air in graphic focuses.
I had two main concerns for lighting the conductor and his symphony: Keep them and their sheet music lit, but don’t blind them. First of all, we made the hall go buy 150 music stand lights. Nobody wants to deal with frustrated musicians who can’t see their sheet music. Putting these music stand lights on a dimmer is risky because I could black them out by accident. Putting them on a wall dimmer of some sort meant giving up control of them. The easiest solution was to “park” the dimmers at 50% in our Flying Pig Systems Wholehog III lighting console. I made sure that all the Vari*lites focused on the symphony were pointed straight down on them. It would have looked better if I had cross focused the instruments on the band members, but then they could be blinded trying to watch the conductor with their peripheral vision. The conductor was lit by two fixtures directly overhead. They changed color but were kept at a steady intensity.
After setting up the consoles with color palettes and focus positions, we went through three straight days of rehearsals. Mike and I have mastered the art of programming these events as we go. We watch one segment once and chart all the changes. Then Mike picks a color scheme and some textures (gobo patterns) and I start putting scenes into the console. Normally, we can get each performance segment programmed by the time the artists have rehearsed their segment three times. Then we leave that segment alone until we have more “quiet time” to critique it later and tweak the looks.
We lit Gloria with hot “Latin” colors. Lights were moving or gobos were spinning on everything but the orchestra. Bernadette Peters did a torch song on top of a piano. We chose to make the whole stage red with hard-edge lights zoomed down in CTO color to keep her looking warm. During a piano concerto, we chose to highlight the interior of the building with textures to paint one beautiful blue scene. Several other local stars took their turn and we kept it simple, yet tasty. The real star of this gig was the building, not the talent. So we spent more time coming up with beautiful layers of color and textures to apply to the interior while settling for simpler looks on the performers.
Using your imagination is an asset to this type of program. Lighting things you would normally like to leave dark can add to the depth of the whole look. There is a giant black speaker cluster hanging in the center of the Carnival Center. By itself it is ugly. But by backlighting this structure with some floor lights we were able to make it another pretty part of the building. The geometric shadows on the ceiling caused by under lighting these speakers were remarkable.
If I were to just use white light to illuminate a symphony, I would be bored. I could watch the same show on PBS. But we chose to treat this as another live event. Matching color schemes to the tempo of the music can really enhance any spectacle, if it is done with taste.
Nook Schoenfeld is a freelance lighting designer. He can be reached at nschoenfeld@ plsn.com. Pictures of this event can be viewed at www.visualventuresdesign. com. Check out his blog at www.plsn.com/ blogs.
