The Burgtheatre in Vienna, which once hosted concerts conducted by Mozart and was the place where Beethoven’s 1st Symphony premiered, has been fitted with a K-array Anakinda audio solution.
The venue stands as the Austrian Nation Theatre and is seen as an important German language theatre. It seats nearly 1,200 people, and including the secondary areas – the Akademietheater and Vestibül – hosts around 800 performances per year.
The theatre’s historic architecture presented problems for Austrian K-Array distributor Muisk Lens. The ceiling of the building is lined with frescoes by Gustav Klimt, and a statue of Apollo stands guard over the main entrance on the Ringstrasse. The interior is the height of opulence, decorated in rich red, cream, and gold with marble floors and paintings of great actors on the walls called Burgtheater Gallery (collection of portraits of members of the Burgtheater in the course of its 200-year history).
Product specialist Karl Wienand from Musik Lenz worked with David Müllner, who is the head of the sound department at the theatre, to devise a solution.
The Burgtheater installed six KAN200s as position based speakers providing directional hearing and projecting the voice to the audience with clarity and quality. “The system allowed us to focus the sound effectively within this beautiful venue and because of the compact size of the speakers the audience didn’t notice them, they blended nicely into the set and the architectur.,” said Wienand.
The theatres shape allows it to be used in a variety of ways: during concerts, theatre performances and conferences. On this occasion six K-array Anankonda’s were used in a recent performance of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The theatre producers will be using KAN200s, Anakonda’s at the next show as a continuous line of front-fill speakers, demonstrating the quality, consistency and practicality of the nearly invisible K-array speakers.
