Pop Orchestra’s Open Air Concert Lights Up with All-LED Rig
Guido’s Orchestra, the popular Dutch ensemble that fuses pop and classical music, performed their annual open-air concert in Kerkrade, The Netherlands, at the end of June. As this also happens to be the home of lighting manufacturer ADJ’s European HQ, it was fitting that a lighting rig consisting entirely of ADJ’s fixtures was used to illuminate the performance which ran over two evenings and featured a number of special guests including internationally-acclaimed Australian vocal group The Ten Tenors.
World-Class Lighting
With a crowd of thousands attending on both nights, TV crews ready to capture the performances for a fall TV special and future DVD release and a vast orchestra on stage, the lighting production for the event had to be world-class. The responsibility for delivering this fell to Dutch production company U-Rent. They used close to 300 ADJ lighting fixtures to create a light show that complemented and enhanced the wide variety of musical styles performed by the orchestra and their guests.
Proving that LED technology has truly come of age, all of the fixtures used for this outdoor production utilized LED light sources, which helped to reduce the amount of temporary power that had to be installed for the event. Although they had supplied the lighting for this show in the past, this was the first time U-Rent had used an all-LED, and indeed an all-ADJ rig.
“All the fixtures we used for the concert were carefully chosen during our preparation for the event,” explains U-Rent’s Natascha Huisman, “so we knew they would have both the required output and features. When we produced this show in the past we used well-established products from the likes of Martin and Robe, so we were looking for fixtures with the same output and effect. In this respect we didn’t downgrade the show, but actually upgraded it by using recently-released products. The ADJ fixtures worked extremely well, giving us the brightness and variety of effects we needed, while also proving reliable and easy to use.”
Eighteen Hanging Clusters
The aerial lighting rig consisted of 18 clusters of fixtures. Each cluster included one of ADJ’s flagship Vizi CMY300 hybrid moving heads and two of the company’s new Vizi Wash Z19 moving head wash units. These were mounted to black pipes, connected at various heights to the roof of the stage, which blended in with a black background to give the impression the lights were floating in the air above the orchestra. In addition to the hanging clusters, 10 Vizi Wash Z19s were also hung from both of the stage’s side walls, and another seven were positioned behind the orchestra at the base of white column drapes that were used to break up the black backdrop.
Standing Up to the Heat
The area was affected by a dramatic heat wave during the event. “On this week it was very hot in the Netherlands,” says Natascha. “It was 36-40°C [97-104°F] during the day, and up in the rooftop of the stage, the temperature hit 65°C [149°F], but the lighting fixtures did their job very well and didn’t let us down. As this was an outdoor event, there was also the possibility of rain, so it was essential that we used IP-rated fixtures for the areas not covered by the roof of the stage.”
U-Rent installed ADJ’s 15 HEX BAR IP linear LED fixtures all around the perimeter of the stage, to allow for vibrant color washing and chasing effects. These were further enhanced by twin clusters of ADJ Encore Burst 200 blinders, which were positioned at equal intervals around the arch of the stage as well as on the PA towers.
Atmospherics were also handled by ADJ products, with two Entourage faze machines alongside a pair of Entour Cyclone DMX-controlled fans filling the roof of the stage with a beam-enhancing mist. Illumination of the orchestra itself, meanwhile, was covered by ADJ’s FR150Z LED-powered Fresnel fixtures that were positioned at FOH as well as behind the back of the moving head clusters.
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