How a Lawo console mixed The Freeshooter opera on The Bregenz Festival’s floating stage

The Bregenz Festival, held annually in Austria, is a renowned cultural event celebrated for its dazzling open-air performances – the main attraction being a showstopping floating stage upon Lake Constance. Established in 1946, the festival showcases a rich, cultural program of opera, classical music, and theatre, attracting artists and audiences from around the world. Each summer, audiences enjoy performances in a breathtaking lakeside setting amid the scenic backdrop of the Austrian Alps.

The jewel in the festival’s crown is undoubtedly the Seebühne – the largest floating stage in the world – which boasts a 6,658-seat open-air amphitheatre. One of its most striking features is the enormous, visually captivating stage designs that reflect the themes of the operas performed.

This year’s production was Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter), which was staged on a vast, elaborate 300-tonne set that was designed to represent an apocalyptic scenery with the remnants of a village after the Thirty Years War.

Indeed, the Bregenz Festival is not just a feast for the ears, but also for the eyes, making it a unique highlight on the international arts calendar. Headliner travelled to Austria to take a look behind the scenes, and discovered how a Lawo mc²96 grand production console makes this extraordinary event possible.

“It's a huge set – even for Bregenzer Festspiele’s standard,” nods Clemens Wannemacher, head of the Bregenz Festival’s sound department. “We have close to 7,000 seats here and the stage is very close to the audience area. It's very wide, plus it's very deep. Preparation, especially for the lake stage, takes a long time, so we start three to four years before opening night.”

You read that correctly: years of meticulous preparation go into each and every Bregenz Festival performance to ensure complete audience immersion. Consider the stage’s dimensions alone (and that’s without factoring in that it’s floating on a lake): the stage this year was approximately 45 metres deep and 70 metres wide, and the smallest distance from the edge of the stage to the first row of spectators is just under 4 metres.

To ensure each audience member experiences pristine audio in this outdoor venue, the sound must deliver a spatial sound experience that closely resembles that of a live music theatre.

“In regards to the audio, the most important part is to hide the speakers in the set,” discloses Wannemacher, gesturing around the expansive open-air amphitheatre around him. “Also, the actors and the singers move around the whole stage, so it's difficult for us to keep track of wherever they are. One thing we really focus on is making it as easy as possible for the audience to follow the singers, so that they listen and they just know [where the singers are] – that's the goal.”

The audio system is unique in Europe in that it utilises a sophisticated spatial audio rendering technique characterised by the creation of virtual acoustic environments. The orchestra plays live in one location, the singers perform on stage, which is all brought together in a breathtaking acoustic experience for the visitors by Wannemacher.

“We have the orchestra sitting inside the festival house, and we transmit them to the lake stage outside,” he explains. “There are close to 60 mics – and that’s only for the orchestra.”

The mixing console making these technical feats possible is a Lawo mc²96 powered by an A__UHD Core DSP engine, which manages all microphone signals from the singers on stage, the choir and the orchestra performing in the close-by opera house, as well as the playout feeds.

Reflecting today’s requirements for immersive audio productions, the mc²96 provides not only superb tools for surround sound mixing at the Bregenz Festival, but also a dedicated elevation controller as standard.

In multi-user mode, 64 rotary encoders in each 16-fader bay give direct access to all important parameters to create an additional central control panel and allow for independent operation and monitoring of a second engineer. “We have two guys mixing: one guy mixing only the voices and another guy mixing the orchestra, the stage musicians and everything else,” explains Wannemacher.

The mc²96’s automated mixing capabilities include an Automix function that can automatically adjust the levels of active and inactive microphones, while maintaining a constant, natural sounding ambient level. This feature provides Wannemacher with unique functionality for the event due to its numerous singers and orchestra members.

“The other challenge was to make sure that the radio mics work in this set,” he explains. “The set consists of a huge pool, and the actors really use the water! They are swimming, diving, kneeling and playing in the water. We tested a lot of different mics to make sure that they do work once they get wet.”

Tying everything together is the Lawo mc²96 console: “The Lawo mc²96 is a centre part of Bregenz Festival,” stresses Wannemacher. “We really used the new multi-channel format features: you can use any multi-channel format you want, and we use mono, of course, and stereo, but also 5.1. and 9.1.4, on the same production. That's really handy. FOH takes care of all the ins and outs that are going through the system, which is quite extensive. We really maxed out our 512 licence this year!”

The mc²96 boasts up to 2,496 DSP channels and up to 256 summing buses, which Wannemacher finds essential for this event. “A big advantage about the Lawo console is that it can handle a lot of channels,” he nods. “It’s very reliable. For instance, it has many VCA groups and we group them together so you can mix the whole show with four fingers. Most of the show, we just have two faders for the orchestra, plus reverb, and then another fader for the stage musicians and another fader for the choir, and all of that makes up more than 100 channels.

“We have a lot of sound effects,” he points out. “We pre-produced them in 9.1.4 to really emphasise the immersive possibilities that we have here: birds, crows, wind, wolves howling and a church tower.”

Another challenge was to compensate for the lack of reflective surfaces typical of concert halls and opera houses. This was accomplished using innovative electro-acoustic techniques that replicate the acoustic experience of an acoustically treated venue. Outside they may be, but the audience still expects a listening experience akin to that of a concert hall.

“We have three main goals to achieve here,” agrees Wannemacher. “The first goal is to make it loud enough so that everyone can hear. The second goal is to create nice acoustic surroundings. The third is to amplify the singers where they are on stage: if they move, the amplification has to move with them.”

He elaborates: “We have a huge audience area. We don't have walls, we don't have a ceiling, we don't have a back wall, so we have to recreate all of this. The goal here is to really surround the audience with a very natural-sounding ‘room’.”

To achieve this, the audio team set up a complicated mic system within a hall, and then recreated it outside in the open air. Also key to the success of the outdoor audio was Müller-BBM’s VIVACE, an electronic room acoustics system designed to improve the acoustics of a listening space (even if that’s outside!) without robbing it of its individual characteristics.

“Using the mc²96, we mixed the signals from the room mics and the VIVACE system for the surrounds,” says Wannemacher. “That’s the 3D audio part of our system, and we have a custom built machine for that. It's called the SpatialSound Wave by Fraunhofer Institut. We can feed 64 objects into the machine, and this helps us to move the objects throughout the sound system.”

As the sun sets over Lake Constance, Wannemacher reflects on another successful Bregenz Festival, which once again pushed the boundaries of creativity and sound, ensuring its place as a pinnacle of cultural excellence year on year.

“If you are looking for a good night and to be entertained for two hours, it’s the right spot to come to,” he smiles.