Founded in 1920, the Salzburg Festival is regarded as the world's most important festival of classical music and performing arts. The six-week cultural spectacle that takes place every year in July and August offers over 200 events and is attended by more than 250,000 guests. The program highlights include the “Jedermann” performance on Cathedral Square, the Mozart and Strauss concerts, and an extensive program of plays, operas, and concerts.
The Salzburg Festival is hosted across three different stages: the “Felsenreitschule” with a capacity of over 1,400 seats, the “Haus für Mozart” (formerly Kleines Festspielhaus), which seats 1,580 visitors, and the “Großes Festspielhaus”, which has a capacity of around 2,200 guests.
Last year, the Salzburg Festival once again invested in modern LED technology. “We are trying to reduce energy consumption in order to reduce our ecological footprint,” says Hubert Schwaiger, Head of Lighting at the Salzburg Festival. The decision was made to go with lighting systems from ETC, provided by ETC's Austrian partner, Preworks. Many High-End SolaFrame Studio fixtures are used in the Mozart House, for example. “The building has perfect acoustics,” says Schwaiger, “so it's important to eliminate any kind of background noise.” A decisive step in this direction was the replacement of the previous moving lights with fan-less and therefore silent High End Systems Sola Frame Studio spotlights from ETC. “Now the audience's listening pleasure is no longer impaired by fan noise from the spotlights,” says Schwaiger.
The Grosses Festspielhaus occupies a special position in the exquisite ensemble of locations. “It's a diamond,” enthuses Schwaiger about the listed building. The dimensions and technical equipment alone illustrate the dimensions of this venue: 100 meters stage width, 25 meters stage depth, portal height 9 meters, and portal width 30 meters. The orchestra pit, which can accommodate up to 110 musicians, is also gigantic. Hubert Schwaiger: “With these dimensions, the lighting is of particular importance, which is a challenge for every performance.”
To master this challenge every year, he relies on state-of-the-art lighting technology from ETC. In addition to the formally mentioned spotlights from the SolaFrame Silent series, models from the Source Four, Source Four PAR, SolaFrame 3000, and ColorSource PAR, as well as various consoles, including Gio, Gio@ 5, and Ion Xe 20, are used in the various venues. This world-famous venue also relies on lighting technology from ETC in the network area. Systems from the Gateway series guarantee fast and reliable data distribution.
Article photos from PreWorks. Additional information and a video (in German) can be found on the PreWorks website.
To learn more about the 2024 Salzburg Festival, happening July 19 - Aug 31, visit https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/