Red TX Captures Concert For Norway

The St. Olaf Choir of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA, has marked its centenary recording at a concert at Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway.
The recording took place last month and was captured by UK audio for broadcast firm Red TX, in conjunction with Visions/NEP.
Consisting of 75 mixed voices, the choir is made up of full-time undergraduate students who rehearse five days a week, in addition to completing a full schedule of academic studies.
Since 1990, the choir has been conducted by Anton Armstrong, and every year it undertakes an annual tour around the world.
To date, the choir has completed 15 international tours and performed for capacity audiences in the major concert halls of Norway, France, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and the Twin Cities.
The last time the choir visited Norway was in 2005, during the country's Centennial celebrating 100 years of independence from Sweden. The St. Olaf Choir joined the St. Olaf Orchestra and the St. Olaf Band for a three-week tour of Norway, during which, the ensembles performed jointly in Oslo, Bergen, Molde, Stiklestad and Trondheim and presented additional concerts throughout the country.
In December of that year, a television special titled A St. Olaf Christmas in Norway was broadcast nationally on PBS in the USA and was released on DVD.
Based on the success of the PBS broadcast, it was decided that the choir should record another special in Trondheim.
To capture the audio for the recording, Red TX drove its large Red II music recording truck to Trondheim; a journey that took three days and involved travelling through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark before finally reaching Norway.
Jeffrey O'Donnell, St. Olaf's Director of Broadcast/Media Services and audio producer, said: "Red TX was recommended by Visions/NEP and although this is the first time we have worked with the company, we were very impressed by their professional approach to what was a complex project. We've been delivering audio in 5.1 since the previous Trondheim program in 2005 and Red TX was more than able to accommodate this requirement. I'm very grateful to Red TX for an amazing job well done – and to Visions for connecting us together in the first place.
"For this particular recording, we were dealing with two choirs – St. Olaf Choir and the jenktekor (Girls' Choir) of Nidaros Cathedral - performing individually and as a combined ensemble," O’Donnell adds.
"We also had a string quartet, piano, Hardanger fiddle, and organ. We faced a particular challenge in providing enough microphone coverage to capture this sound while still doing our best to avoid having microphones and stands appear in the camera shots."
Red TX's director Tim Summerhayes suggested a selection of microphones. DPA Microphone's UK distributor Sound Network was able to supply most of the microphones he needed, with the rest made up from Schoeps and AKG.
"We used Schoeps MK2 systems, suspended at a height of about four meters, to capture the two choirs and the congregation," Mr Summerhayes explains.
"We also suspended DPA mobile 5100 surround microphones at about six meters in the centre of the performance area to give the impression of the size of the choir and of the cathedral. For the brass quartet, we used two DPA 3521s compact mics on DPA’s ORTF mic mount. The clarity was very impressive and blended into the mix seamlessly. For the piano, we opted for a pair of AKG 414s."
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(IT/JP)