Finnish National Opera Completes The Ring Cycle with MA Lighting's grandMA3Visual designer Mikki Kunttu was part of the creative team delivering Gotterdammerung at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, Finland, this summer, the final work in their staging of Wagner's Ring Cycle, a story as legendary as it is epic in scale. Kunttu designed lighting, video, and scenography, as well as programmed lighting and video for the production on a grandMA3 system from MA Lighting. Control for all four Ring Cycle operas was MA, but for this final work, everything was in place for Kunttu to go fully grandMA3. This was partly facilitated by the Opera which made the grandMA2 to grandMA3 transition over the summer of 2023. The earlier Ring Cycle productions -- Das Rheingold in 2019, followed, after pandemic-related interruptions, by Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) in 2022, then Siegfried in 2023 -- were created using grandMA2 or a mix of grandMA2 and grandMA3 for previz and production. In the last year, Kunttu has also started using the power and flexibility of grandMA3 on his various design projects. Gotterdammerung's grandMA3 system was comprised of two grandMA3 full-size, one grandMA3 light, one grandMA3 onPC command wing XT, and two grandMA3 processing units XL, two grandMA3 2Port Nodes, 28 grandMA3 4Port Nodes, and six grandMA3 8Port Nodes, all owned by the Opera House. Kunttu also used the Opera's in-house lighting rig, which for Gotterdammerung featured 237 moving lights from three different manufacturers -- Martin, Vari-Lite, and Claypaky, together with fog and haze machines. These were all run through the grandMA3 full-size console. Additionally, 11 Green Hippo media servers were also controlled by the grandMA3 light console, feeding content out to six projectors and several LED screens plus 50 pixel strip fixtures. This complete Ring Cycle project was almost eight years in the making for Kunttu, from his initial conversations in 2016 to the staging of Gotterdammerung. He was commissioned the design by The National Opera's Artistic director Lilli Paasikivi, who had been very inspired by his earlier work for Sibelius' Kullervo. The Ring's creative team comprised stage director Anna Kelo, costume designer Erika Turunen, and Kunttu. Musical conductors for the different parts of the Ring were Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Malkki, and Hannu Lintu. Designing the essential triumvirate of visual departments -- lighting, video, and set -- is the way Kunttu prefers to work, as he can harmonize between the different aspects while exploring the space, symbiotic relationships, and integration between all relative to the narrative action. For Kunttu, The Ring brought many challenges, and a major one was keeping the messages clear and bold for the audiences while reflecting the huge complexities of the work itself. "The larger it gets the more I tend to concentrate on the basics," he notes. "Wagner has written a lot of visual guidelines into the libretto, and we had no reason to largely disagree with him!" Kunttu developed a concept, where the main set pieces stayed the same through the four productions, and the scenes and visual variants were inspired by and / or complemented the main elements and visual theme. "Scene-specific ideas for sets, lighting and video elements are not really core thinking for this version of The Ring," he explains. The main physical set pieces were five black towers that travelled through all the productions creating the desired environments and spaces. Each carried a large LED screen. "Effectively, a tower was a see-through set piece that could be revolved in any direction," explains Kunttu. When it came to the lighting control, having been an MA user for decades and made the move to grandMA3, he comments, "It's a big step forward. There's quite a learning curve of course, but it is absolutely worth it! There's no going back now and there is nothing I miss from the old grandMA2." As a designer who also programs most of his own shows, both lighting and video, from previz to production, he has a distinctive perspective on how a console should work as a tool to further imagination and artistic expression. Small practicalities repeated hundreds of times daily make a big difference in time consumed when programming, so grandMA3 features like being able to program and customize encoder layouts are an aspect he appreciates. He also thinks grandMA3 is ell suited for controlling video and media servers. He highlights how programming for opera or theatre is radically different to concerts, music shows, or TV productions, and sometimes in these worlds, grandMA3's more powerful features -- like Phasers -- are rarely needed. "Opera is more about fine adjustments and looking for the right nuances and detailing. Flexible and programmable views, great tracking sheets, macros, etc., are all vital, rather than some of the gimmickier operations," he says smiling. Here, Kunttu relies on the multi-application approach of grandMA3 to be a great tool not only in concert and touring scenarios, but also for theatre and opera programming. The Opera House lighting crew included lighting managers Kimmo Ruskela and Tommi Harkonen, deputy lighting manager Gabriel Phillips-Sanchez, lighting operator Tommi Saviranta and video operators, Heikki Riihijarvi and Jani Virmavirta. Find out more about: grandMA3 full-size
grandMA3 light
grandMA3 onPC command wing XT
grandMA3 processing unit XL
grandMA3 2Port Node
grandMA3 4Port Node
grandMA3 8Port Node 
|
