New York, NY (September 11, 2015)—While director Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have famously made eight movies together, that doesn’t even come close to the number of collaborations Burton’s worked on with composer Danny Elfman: 15 films and counting. The result has been some of the most memorable themes in recent movie history, and those in turn were the focus of a recent week-long string of concerts at New York City’s Avery Fisher Music Hall in Lincoln Center.
Danny Elfman: Music from the Films of Tim Burton found the orchestra and chorus performing in concert with visuals of Tim Burton’s original sketches, drawings, story boards, and film clips on the big screen above. The concert featured a series of suites from 15 scores Elfman has composed in his collaborations with Burton including Batman, Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks, Edward Scissorhands, Alice in Wonderland, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow, to name a few.
The concert featured the Concert Chorale of New York with the Philharmonia Orchestra of New York lead by Grammy winning conductor John Mauceri. Sound engineer Paul Bevan manned the front of house audio position. Bevan has mixed the Danny Elfman: Music from the Films of Tim Burton project in a number of venues around the world, and having worked in the Avery Fisher Music Hall, Bevan noted, “the Avery Fisher Hall is a world-class venue for orchestral music, although it presents many challenges for any kind of amplified show,” adding, “When designing a suitable system for this project, RCF TTL line arrays were recommended to me by several people whose opinions I respect.”
As a result, a RCF TTL line array system was selected comprised a left-right hang of 20 TTL33-A three-way line array modules with four TTS56-A double 21” subwoofers. Four TT052-A dual 5” cabinets were added for front of stage lip fill, and four TT08-A 8” two-way cabinets provided monitoring for the conductor and choir. The system was operated through RCF’s RDNet 2.2 software, which provided the house engineer both control and monitoring of the system in real time.
“We had very little time for set-up and tuning the system,” recallled Bevan. “The cabinets went up quickly and easily in a venue that had never seen them before. The prediction software the RCF support engineer Emanuele Moralini used gave an extremely even and natural sound throughout the venue, even before the small amount of tweaking that would be necessary in any venue with any system. The clarity and separation that I was able to achieve, given the many different textures, made mixing the show in an extremely reverberant hall much easier than I expected. The system integrated these various elements beautifully.
“A further validation was that one of the shows was filmed by PBS for an upcoming TV show. I been in the studio with Ken Hahn of Sync Sound, mixing the tracks that were recorded that night. The cleanliness of the recorded tracks is astonishing, with no sign of the PA spilling back into the microphones. Considering that there were approximately 90 microphones in use, throughout the orchestra and chorus, this is a testimony to the control that I was able to achieve, while maintaining a full and dynamic mix in the hall.”
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