Stephen Sondheim's 'Gypsy' is playing at the 'renewed' Chichester Festival Theatre this month following a £22 million refurbishment project by architects Haworth Tompkins and theatre design consultant Charcoalblue to create 21st Century facilities.

Earlier this year, His Holiness the Dalai Lama hosted Kalachakra, a religious event that takes place at various locations around the world every few years. With a now 79-year-old religious figure at the helm for the nearly two-week long Kalachakra 2014 prayer meeting, high importance was placed on finding a microphone that would project his voice to the nearly 200,000 followers who attended. The solution was found in DPA Microphones’ d:fine™ Dual-Ear Cardioid Headset Microphone, which was supplied from the company’s US office. The microphone was such a success that it is now the preferred microphone for His Holiness for all of his speaking engagements.

October 12, 2014, marked the 50 Year anniversary of the unveiling of the Moog modular synthesizer at the Audio Engineering Society's (AES) New York convention. On that day in 1964, Dr. Robert Moog introduced the world to a completely new type of instrument that would go on to change the course of music history and influence decades of future instrument design.

Looking for a digital console to meet its needs for high-resolution recordings and live radio broadcasts, the prestigious St. Louis Symphony found the ideal solution in HARMAN’s Studer Vista 5 console. Offering 128 channels at a 96kHz sample rate, the Vista 5 has given the Symphony tremendous versatility, redundancy and world-class audio quality

The Aalto Theatre in Essen just upgraded to Salzbrenner Stagetec Mediagroup’s latest audio technology. The opera house decided that the Mediagroup’s contracting branch replace the entire sound system on behalf of the theatre construction society tbe. Quite a few STAGETEC products, like the AURUS® console, several NEXUS® Base Devices and the NEXUS® STAR router, were installed in the recording studio, on the main stage and in the hall to ensure perfect communication between orchestra, sound engineer and conductor.

After working with RG Jones’ Martin Audio Multi-cellular Loudspeaker Array (MLA) at Glastonbury Festival — as well as the smaller footprint MLA Compact at other events — David McEwan’s vision was to fire it up in anger at the holy grail of London venues, the Royal Albert Hall.

As part of the Warsaw Mozart Festival, which has been running for more than 20 years, lighting designer Adam Tyszka this year took on responsibility for an open air performance of the W. A. Mozart opera “The Magic Flute”. This opera took place in the courtyard of the 17th century Museum of King Jan III Palace at Wilanow, thus using the prestigious façade as a beautiful backdrop for lighting and video creativity.

The fifth annual Masada Opera Festival, held at the foot of Mount Masada—one of Israel’s most popular tourist attractions—featured stunning performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata opera for an audience of thousands over the course of six days. With Mount Masada serving as a stage backdrop and the sets incorporating the desert elements of the area, Lighting Director Bogumil Palewicz along with Michal Znaniecki, Stage Director, and Luigi Scoglio, Set Designer, deployed HARMAN’s Martin Professional fixtures to provide stage and effects lighting.

Music festivals have increased in number and diversity in recent years, and regional festivals have enjoyed explosive growth. Two of this season’s most successful regional festivals took place this August in Oregon where the five-year-old BI-MART Willamette Country Music Festival in Brownsville (August 15-17) drew upwards of 25,000 fans who came to hear acts like Blake Shelton, Gary Allen and Eric Church. Regional discount retailer BI-MART also launched a new sister festival in Sixes this year, the Cape Blanco Country Music Festival (August 1-3), which attracted as many as 15,000 to hear Brad Paisley, Eric Church and Justin Moore, among others.

Since 1949, The Aspen Music Festival and School has been one of the most famous classical music festivals in the world and one of the most prolific, hosting more than 350 performances between June and August each year. The Festival, which features four in-residence orchestras where students play alongside faculty, is recorded each year and can be heard on American Public Media (APM), Colorado Public Radio and Aspen Public Radio. To faithfully capture every nuance of the performances, The Festival relies on several Neumann M 150 microphones at its principal venue: Benedict Music Tent.

The soundscape imagined by director Andreas Kriegenburg for the new production of “Don Juan kommt aus dem Krieg” at the Salzburg Festival (18 July through 31 August 2014) required top-notch equipment and talented engineers. Managing the high number of cues and microphone signals was only possible thanks to the decision of Salzburg Festival’s technical director, Andreas Zechner, to use a Salzbrenner Polaris Touch mixing console consisting of three modules. Renowned for their reliability, product quality and scalability, this German-made solution was deemed indispensable for the sound effects and other audio props requested by the director.

San Antonio’s new Tobin Center for the Performing Arts will open in September with a complement of Clay Paky Alpha Spot QWO 800 fixtures dedicated to both the H-E-B Performance Hall and the Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater.

As in recent years, sound engineer Carsten Kümmel handled classical production duties at the 2014 Thurn & Taxis Classic Festival (Schlossfestspiele) in Regensburg/Germany. Among the performances he mixed were Guiseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, Operas in Bavarian and the gala performance of star soprano Angela Gheorghiu and the Symphonic Orchestra from Hof/Germany – all on a Lawo mc²56 console. In addition to Kümmel’s work as the event’s house engineer, guest mix engineers, such as Giora Feidman, were able to use the console extremely comfortably.

New pilot program, designed for patrons interested in a technology-enhanced concert experience, offers concertgoers access to program notes, interviews, and multiple concert camera angle feeds through their smart-phones and tablets this August 15 and 23.

Lighting for the recent edgy Royal Court Theatre (RCT) production of  Tim Crouch’s ‘Adler & Gibb’ was designed by award winning and leading theatre lighting designer Natasha Chivers, who included two of Robe’s MMX Blade fixtures in her lighting scheme which were used extensively throughout the drama.