Every second year the Enescu Festival is held in Bucharest, Romania. This festival is to the remembrance of the Romanian composer George Enescu. The festival is held for three weeks in September and famous orchestras from around the world perform there. The main stage of the festival is Sala Palatului, a hall connected to the former royal palace. This 25,000m33 4000 seats hall was designed for congress purposes and needs to be adapted for symphonic performances when the festival is held. For this a 64-channel mcr system is used, that needs to be tuned. This is done by measurements. The fine tuning is done by listening during the rehearsals of the first performing orchestra and the during opening concert.
The opening orchestras of the last festivals were:
2009: Filharmonica “George Enescu” conducted by Maxim Vengerov
2011: The Hague Philharmonic conducted by Christian Badea
2013: Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Daniel Barenboim
2015: Romanian Youth Orchestra conducted by Kristian Yärvi. During this session I was appointed assistant to the conductor in order to balance the orchestra's sound.
2017: London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Yurowski. Assistant to the conductor was Tiberiu Soare, who was collaborating with me balancing the orchestra's sound and the acoustics.
2019: Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Kirill Petrenko.
2021: Filharmonica “George Enescu” with concertmaster Sarah Nemtanu, conducted by Paavo Järvi and the London Symphonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle;
For these performances and rehearsals special provisions had been taken to perform during the pandemic. Adaptations had been made to maintain and improve orchestral balance under these conditions and much effort was put into fine tuning the orchestral sound in close collaboration with the conductors and concert master.
view at the front facade of the building (2017), photo: Ilina Schileru
view from the hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (2017), photo: Ilina Schileru
view at the stage with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (2017), photo: Ilina Schileru
myself (r) in discussion with conductor Vladimir Yurowski (m) and festival director Mihai Constantinescu (l) (2017), photo: Ilina Schileru