Went to see my local symphony last night do Requiem. One of the singers used a microphone but others did not. Is that common? (to use amplification)
No, it is not common.
Whose ‘Requiem’? If it’s the Andrew Lloyd Webber, the treble (boy soprano) soloist has a really hard part to sing acoustically over the orchestra.
Mozart’s Requiem. I was also surprised to see 2 very large mixing boards there, they were both at least 32 channels. Maybe they are mostly used for other concerts , not classical but I am pretty sure they used one of them last night.
Which soloist? Male or female?
I agree with Le Ministre. It’s not common for a soloist in Mozart’s Requiem to use a microphone. I’ve performed it in various choirs at least 15 times over the years and I’ve never seen it happen. Soloists are supposed to be able to project over the orchestra. It would be even more odd for just one of the soloists to use a microphone.
Was this a symphony hall or some other venue? I’ve done lots of classical music amplification, but you would do the whole orchestra and all singers, definitely not one soloist, and surely not in a concert hall designed to play classical music (think outdoor, large halls, special venues).
I’m sorry if this sounds snobby, but if you need a mic to sing the Mozart Requiem then you just shouldn’t be singing it in public. That’s like needing an e-bike to compete in the Tour de France.
It isn’t just the athletic component of singing loud enough to be heard over the orchestra; it’s a question of what amplification does to the quality of sound in a work that has been performed over the last 200+ years without needing electronic assistance.
Don’t wanna hijack, but I do feel like I need to respond to that since it directly concerns me. Ministre, if you’re talking about a regular performance in a purpose-built symphony hall, I completely agree with you. (There are exceptions here, too - Rodrigo’s Concierto de Arajuez, for example, is almost universally performed with an amplified guitar although it’s from the 1930s.) However, once you go in 5,000+ people venues or outdoors, the game changes significantly - how do you think they do it at the Hollywood Bowl?
Classical music amplification is part of what I do for a living, and it’s true that it is sometimes done very poorly. When you’ve studied the music and keep its aesthetics in mind, though, it can actually be beneficial to the performance. I just finished a 12 performance run of The Magic Flute, performed outdoors for 4000 people. The advantage you have in this situation is that you can actually make the audience hear the singers and understand the words - something that’s all too rare in conventional opera. Yes, the string sound can suffer a bit (that’s really, really hard to nail when you’ve got huge line array speakers and a problematic orchestra layout), but in many cases there’s really no other way.
It was a female in a symphony hall. Also if it matters there was also a large chorus but they did not sing when she sang. I am not 100% sure she was singing through an amp but it sounded like that and the mic was in front of her.
Were there other mics either hanging from the ceiling or on stands in the orchestra? Could it have been a recording? If it was just her that was being amplified I agree with everyone that that is very strange indeed. Never heard or seen that before.
There were 2 other mics hanging above. so maybe her mic was just for recording, but it seemed to me that her voice was also coming from behind me. Maybe that was just an echo.