One of Europe’s largest festivals for jazz, soul, and pop rock music, BW-Bank jazzopen stuttgart 2009 recently concluded after 11 days of live concerts, featuring Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Sonny Rollins, and a special presentation of Katie Melua with the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra.
The largest concerts this year were moved indoors to the new Stuttgart fairgrounds, with Meyer Sound components playing a key role in the sound reinforcement for the first time.
The transition to Stuttgart fairgrounds offered a convenient location for the 28,000 visitors, and gave the performers a more stable environment despite Germany’s unpredictable summer weather conditions.
“With this new venue, we opened a new page in the festival’s history and it was important for us to also move sound to a new level,” says Jürgen Schlensog, promoter of the BW-Bank jazzopen stuttgart. “And this year, we successfully achieved this and even more with the great Meyer Sound system.”
Schlensog and co-festival director Mini Schulz commissioned Bodo Bergmann, veteran sound designer and Matthias Kreiner, the festival’s technical director to specify the sound design, with equipment support from Hamburg-based Procon Event Engineering.
The system was designed for flexibility and could be easily adapted into different configurations to accommodate the specific needs of each artist and to cover a variety of audience sizes, ranging from 1,600 to 8,500.
Using Meyer Sound’s MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program with architectural renderings provided by Jens Mueller of Autostage, Bergmann created a basic system consisted of two hangs with 13 M3D and one MILO 120 line array loudspeakers with a center downfill of six MICA line array loudspeakers, augmented by six UPA-1P and UPA-2P loudspeakers each as nearfield systems.
For Katie Melua’s show with the Stuttgart Philharmonics, two additional arrays with 12 MICA line array and two UPQ-1P loudspeakers were added to serve as outfill for the 8,500 visitors seated on the outer areas of the 26,000-square-meter hall.
As requested for Lenny Kravitz and Joss Stone, especially powerful bass support was handled by 18 M3D-Sub directional subwoofers and two arrays of nine 700-HP subwoofers in a cardioid configuration.
Monitoring was provided by two arrays with six M’elodie line array loudspeakers and three 500-HP subwoofers, also configured in a cardioid formation.
On stage, Bergmann employed 20 USM-1P and four MJF-212A stage monitors, in addition to two UPQ-1P loudspeakers and two 600-HP subwoofers as foldback for the drummers and 12 UPM-1P loudspeakers for the orchestras.
Kreiner is pleased with the successful collaboration with Meyer Sound and Bodo Bergmann, and reports that the system helped alleviate the stress of a busy festival schedule. “We had a very flexible sound system which provided power and crystal clear audio in all the different configurations from the first time it was switched on, so I could focus on the other trades.”
In the fairground’s atrium, a smaller system featuring Meyer Sound components provided reinforcement for artists such as Sarah Kaiser Band and Fabiano Pereira. The system comprised two stacks of ten M1D line array loudspeakers, two MM-4XP miniature loudspeakers, and four M1D-Sub and two 600-HP subwoofers.
Selected shows from the Stuttgart Jazzopen will be shown on 3sat television network in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria starting August 14.
Created by Germany-based Opus Festival-, Event and Management GmbH, jazzopen stuttgart was a spinoff of the Stuttgart Jazz Summit (Stuttgarter Jazzgipfel).
