Prince Igor Opera at Astrakan

Astrakhan in south Russia, hosted an impressive classical music event which gathered an audience of more than 5,000 people. Set Inside the old walls of the Astrakhan Kremlin, a stronghold fortress that began construction in the 16th century, the Astrakhan State Theatre of Opera and Ballet performed an open-air presentation of the famous opera, Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin. On the night of the performance, the central square of the Kremlin was transformed into the seating area while the beautiful Cathedral of the Assumption and adjacent buildings served as the stage backdrop. 

A temporary 40 x 20 m platform was assembled for the orchestra at center stage. All sound equipment used for the performance, including Allen & Heath dLive mixing consoles, a main K-array PA system, and Audio-Technica microphones and wireless systems, was provided by Russia distributor MixArt. The main PA system consisted of two line arrays of 6 Dragon-KX12 coaxial point sources paired with 4 Thunder-KMT218 18” subwoofers. Two Pinnacle-KR802 portable systems were used as delay speakers and two Pinnacle-KR102 systems were used as front fills to ensure even coverage of the entire seating area.

The sound quality surpassed all our expectations. K-array provided crystal clear and natural sound while being compact and almost invisible! One of our major concerns was to make sure that the audience would hear the true vocals, choir and orchestra instruments as if they were in the theater without sound reinforcement and the K-array systems did more than help us meet that aim!

Vadim Scherbakov (Mixart Director - South and Project Chief Sound Engineer)