Throw away your stereotypical stuffy ideas about opera. The Santa Fe Opera is no ordinary opera company, and the company’s home, the open-air Crosby Theatre, is no ordinary opera house. The opera’s new production of Orfeo, directed by Yuval Sharon with music by Claudio Monteverdi and a world premiere orchestration by Nico Muhly, is an innovative reimagining of one of the oldest known operatic works. The artistic choices around this production, which include using effects-processing on individual voices as well as mixing them spatially into the specially built multichannel surround system, required that the key characters wear wireless mic systems. For this, the opera uses Lectrosonics SSM belt pack transmitters and channels of Venue2 receivers.
Although opera traditionally is done 100% acoustically, the innovative artistic directions that Sharon took for Orfeo required very close miking of the non-chorus performers so that their voices could be cleanly processed. Area mics would not sufficiently isolate the individual voices from each other and from ambient sound. Therefore, sound designer Mark Grey opted to use Lectrosonics wireless. Grey had used these wireless systems in recent years with the Santa Fe Opera in staging Doctor Atomic by John Adams, and The Lord of Cries, by John Corigliano, both modern American works. For Orfeo, the choice was obvious.
