Het Concertgebouw, one of Amsterdam's most renowned concert halls, is hosting the VriendenLoterij ZomerConcerten, a summer series of more than eighty concerts running for over ten weeks across classical, jazz, pop and film music.
To support this demanding season, rental company P3 Podiumtechniek invested in 24 PROLIGHTS Muse Profile70CT+ LED profile moving lights, a highly versatile addition to its rental package. Peter Peereboom of P3 Podiumtechniek commented on the investment: "Thanks to its broad versatility and the appreciation it has found among several lighting designers, this fixture is a particularly welcome addition to our rental package."
Before the final decision was made, Peter Peereboom put several fixtures through testing and comparison, involving a number of lighting designers in the process. "Peter enjoys brainstorming creative solutions for practical problems. He understands the big picture but also has an eye for detail," said Tiedo Wilschut of CUE1, who was responsible for the lighting design and technical production of the concert series. "After several tests and discussions, we concluded that the Muse Profile70CT+ was a fantastic option for this project. In addition, it proved to be an interesting investment for P3, partly thanks to the broad support among various lighting designers."
Tiedo Wilschut developed a flexible lighting design capable of adapting to the full range of concerts without compromising the daily productions already scheduled in the hall. Since roughly eighty per cent of the ZomerConcerten programme consists of unamplified performances, silent operation was a critical factor in the choice of fixture.
"It might sound strange, but when I design lighting for this hall, the first thing I look at is how the fixture sounds," Tiedo explained. "When everyone holds their breath during a delicate piano solo, even the hum of fans can shatter the moment. The Muse Profile70CT+ features a Silent mode where the noise level is exceptionally low. I was quite impressed by that."
Above the hall sits a loft with steel beams and hoisting rails, used throughout the series for sound systems, acoustic drapes and projection screens. Since these rails had to stay free for the hall's daily productions, P3 Podiumtechniek developed a solution in which the entire lighting set rests on the loft floor, complemented by a dedicated steel structure to mount a fixture at the head of the balcony for side light.
Across the season the Muse fixtures are used for backlight, side light and supplementary front light; for that last role in particular, faithful colour rendering and precise colour-temperature control are essential.
"The Muse has very high colour accuracy, with a colour rendering index of 98, and stepless colour temperature control," Wilschut explained. "It produces truly beautiful light, and plenty of it. When I light a soloist, the spot is often set at just forty per cent."
Additive colour mixing brings a further advantage on such a varied a programme: where traditional systems built around a white LED source and CMY colour flags tend to lose a great deal of output the moment saturated colours are produced, the Muse Profile70CT+ stays powerful even in deep, intense tones.
"Warm or cool white is virtually identical in intensity, and the red tones remain beautiful and very present," Wilschut continued. "That gives us much more freedom to give each concert evening a character of its own."
That quality holds up not only in the hall but also on camera. The team filming the series noted how faithfully the lighting is rendered on screen: thanks to the high colour rendering index, skin tones, costumes and stage colours are reproduced accurately, while the multi-colour LED source and precise colour control let the lighting be tuned to suit both the atmosphere in the room and the technical requirements of the cameras. The result is a convincing image for the audience in the hall, with the same quality preserved in the recordings, making the Muse Profile70CT+ exceptionally well suited to concerts where the live experience and professional video capture come together.
Full AVL, PROLIGHTS' distributor in the Netherlands, supplied the fixtures for the production.
On a programme as wide-ranging as the ZomerConcerten, the Muse Profile70CT+ confirmed the reliability and versatility of PROLIGHTS fixtures. Its Silent operating mode, combined with its 1,000W six-colour LED engine and colour rendering index of 98, allowed the design to meet both the acoustic and the visual demands of the venue.
Photo credit: Michael Moorthaemer, Jim Cloots, Tiedo Wilschut, Simon Reinink
For more information, please contact: marketing@prolights.it.
