Does any major, professional opera company use a sound system for enhancing singers or orchestra? In my day, this would have been a travesty, but what’s the state-of-the-art in 2003?
I’m talking about sound systems for the general audience (not the microphones used for backstage monitoring, or for “assisted listening” earphones.
If anyone could cite definite “YES” or “NO” for specific opera companies, I would be most appreciative.
No real clue, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff on Google under “opera sound system”. Any particular opera house you’re interested in?
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The New York City Opera is under some controversy for using a electronic acoustic system that in a literal sense counts as amplification (it’s well documented in the New York Times and other sources). But it’s designed (the opera claims) to deal with the atrocious acoustics of its home, Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, which was designed for dance, not opera. City Opera doesn’t have the finances to undertake the sort of total renovation that the Theatre would require to make it suitable, so the electronic system is a sort of half measure. City Opera has been hoping to get a new home, and it might downtown, possible in whatever complex arises at Ground Zero. But in the current economy, it’s all pretty speculative.
The New York Opera, on the other hand, uses no such devices. Its home, the Opera House faces the Theater but is much better acoustically, permitting the sort of pure, unamplified sound tradionalists crave.
In any case, City Opera’s system is not amplification in the sense that you might think, such as in virtually all Broadway musicals where the singers wear body mikes that truly do amplify. It’s audience taste.
Thanks OxyMoron! By “New York Opera”, I assume you mean the Metropolitan Opera, which does indeed make its home at Lincoln Center’s Met Opera House, just across from the NYCO’s New York State Theater.
I was indeed most interested in the Met and the NYCO, but I’d be ANXIOUS to hear from any other opera fans anywhere in the world!
BTW: Broadway musicals weren’t amplified much before the 1970s, and yet , they played in the same large Broadway theatres they do today. So either the singers are losing their lung power, or the audience’s ears are getting weaker.
More importantly, there is a general change in style of songs. Once you start adding rock influences and an amplified orchestra, it’s hard to sing over it.
In addition, audiences are used to listening to music at louder levels. People “crank it up,” and would find unamplified voices on Broadway to be too quiet.
:rolleyes: :eek: :smack:
Goddamn, I knew I was posting too late!
Ok, so I’m now a bit less befogged. See if you can find a couple of the Times Arts & Leisure section articles from when the NYCO system was installed (if you’re really interested, it’d be worth a couple of bucks to poke around their archives), which compared the situation to Broadway. IIRC, it does, in fact, appear to be a combination of the two factors you name. Audience ears are getting a bit weaker: high ticket prices are skewing the crowds ever older, and most younger viewers have no experience whatsoever of unamplified music (hell, even churches use amplification nowadays).
Performers have changed, too. Choreography is now much more athletic and demanding than it used to be, and to the extent there were separate singers and dancers in the old days, that’s almost uneard of now. So it’s physically very difficult for performers to project the way the stolid, immovable Ethel Merman did. (Bernadette Peters, the one star I can think of who can truly open a show on her own star power, is not exactly known for her dancing. Consequently, her shows tend to be very traditional - Sondheim or Annie Get Your Gun, rather than Rent or Cats.)
Slight hijack: trick casting also doesn’t help. One August (a/k/a high trick casting season) an insistent friend pushed me to spend $100 for a Rocky Horror ticket to see…Luke Perry as Brad. He was pretty awful, with a high, thin, completely untrained voice that even amplified faded into nothing, except in his one solo.
(The redeeming part of the experience was meeting Perry backstage: the reason for the whole endeavor was my friend’s having worked with Perry on HBO’s Oz. So we hung out with him by his dressing room while he outwaited groupies - which he still has, half a decade after 90210 died. Totally nice, unaffected guy, very much an ordinary Minnesotan with no illusions about his musical skills. He freely admitted that he’d taken role as a lark - “I’m in New York for Oz, I’ll never have this opportunity again, why not?”)
So all these factors mean that amplification is here to stay on Broadway. I suspect opera will be next if it wants to survive as other than a museum piece.
And in rearranging the Perry hijack I lost the important point:
He’d never done a musical and never done Broadway, and was given all of two weeks to rehearse, which apparently was more than most trick-cast performers get.