'It’s a very delicate act': Sound engineering for cinema opera

It was in 2008 that the Royal Opera House began relaying some of its performances directly to audiences in a special new way. Opera broadcasting on television was far from new: since the 1970s televised performances from international opera houses had become increasingly popular in homes around the world. But opera seen and heard by large gatherings of audiences coming together in other public buildings, some of them thousands of miles away from the theatre of origin, was new.

The earliest experimental relay of an opera simultaneously reaching audiences in a number of different cinemas dates back to 1952, when a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was seen by closed circuit landline in 31 cinemas up and down America – but it was not until December 2006 when the Met launched its 'Live in HD' series that vastly improved technology enabled the concept to take off as a regular high quality initiative, initially reaching 98 venues in four countries.

The first relay was of The Magic Flute, and the Royal Opera followed suit with its new series 'Live Cinema' two years later: Don Giovanni was the first opera in September 2008, reaching 113 cinemas in the UK and Europe. Ten years later a report revealed that over a million tickets had been sold to cinema audiences in 51 countries around the world watching 12 ROH productions in the 2017-2018 season. They came to over 500 cinemas in the UK and more than 1000 cinemas in other parts of the world – and what they experienced in the cinemas that were equipped with the latest state of the art audio visual reproduction was a sonic impression that many people felt was revelatory.

I was astounded when on my first visit I heard what felt to me the full acoustic spectrum of the Royal Opera House theatre – the stage, the orchestra pit, and the complete space of the entire auditorium – open up in 360 degrees with an uncanny life-like realism that made me feel I was not in the cinema but was actually in the ROH itself. Nothing sounded artificially 'miked up' – everything seemed to be floating across from the ROH, the theatre that I know so well, by some kind of a magic conveyor. Being a prejudiced sceptic about recording and broadcasting classical music with many arrays of microphones, I fantasised that maybe a new single point microphone pick-up for everything had been invented – and my arrogant ignorance was smashed into tatters when I asked the man behind many of the sound productions to enlighten me.

Jonathan Allen knows all there is to know about sound: for 23 years he was one of Abbey Road Studio’s top balance engineers, responsible for award-winning classical releases by major labels and many feature film soundtracks (including a BAFTA for the feature film Les Miserables). Along with the Opera House’s sound and broadcast team Jonathan helped develop the ROH Cinema relays, which in recent years have progressed from 5.1 Surround Sound to immersive Dolby Atmos – and he still records international artists in studios for a wide variety of artists, as producer as well as engineer.

'I am very much an artist led engineer and producer, and I believe that from the earliest times of recording right up to today generally it has been the artists that have led the game,' he told me. 'Certainly in my case with studio recordings I’m committed to work out how to make the result as close as possible to what artists are searching for. This means never relying on a single formula and being flexible with the techniques used. Not all producers have had this approach. I grew up with the famous hands-on legacy of Walter Legge, the Artists and Repertoire director at EMI where I began my career as an engineer in the early 1990s. He had been gone from EMI for the best part of 30 years but his influence was still very much felt in the philosophy of some producers – that they were there to lead the proceedings not only in determining the sound but also show how clever they could be with digital editing to influence the performance of the artist.

'I have always thought, "Look, these artists have been living with these works and we basically just join the project on the recording days – who are we to come to the table and tell them how we think they should be doing it?!" Obviously some artists need more help than others, but from these experiences I decided my job is to be a conduit to the artists and help them realise what they want to achieve in a recording. Recordings shouldn’t compete with live concerts, they are an artifice which stand on the merits of the medium. My aim has always been that no one except the engineer should be aware of the technical side of recording, as we help bring the listener closer to the music.

'Artists approach sound in different ways, some can only be concerned with their own performance making it difficult to integrate them into the bigger picture and some I think could be more involved. Then there are artists like Sir Antonio Pappano who understands recording incredibly well and will enunciate very precisely what he is after and work with you, and push you, to find the right balance and colours for the music that we’re recording. I love that collaboration. Artists and engineers have been able to work this way from the 60s, remixing the sound together, but so many reviewers still treat the music and sound as different departments. Quite often the sound world of a CD is closely integrated to the expression of the artists and should be evaluated that way.'

It was Sir Antonio Pappano, enjoying tremendous success as the Royal Opera House’s inspired Music Director, who catalysed events that were to lead to Jonathan Allen working with the ROH’s 'Cinema Live' from its early days.

'At EMI Classics I worked a lot with one of the finest producers, David Groves, who completely shared my approach to recording, that is representing the artists’ wishes first and foremost and searching for the balance and colours that served the music best. We both made Tony Pappano’s recordings and David had an incredible experience producing operas for many years, particularly with Riccardo Muti.

'One day late in 2006 Tony came to us and said he would like us to do an investigation into audio balancing at the Royal Opera House, and I proposed that the only way we could do this properly was to make a recording there rather than try and come up with theoretical recommendations. So we decided to take a new production opening in January 2007 that was being earmarked for a DVD release – it was Donizetti’s La fille du regiment with Natalie Dessay in the title role.

'We illustrated our approach to give a sound picture that was exciting and captured the life on stage and in the pit within an overall homogeneous impression of the acoustic of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Now for us that also meant consistency of the vocal image all the way through – so wherever the singers may be on the stage at one given moment there is an immediate attachment to the voice. Not by close highlighting, but by precisely following them in their own true perspective.

'It worked well, so I was thrilled when not so long afterwards the ROH called us about the cinema broadcasts that they were planning to commence the following year. The reason I was so thrilled is that we all contribute to The Royal Opera House’s income but few people experienced it. I remember after one of the very first relays we did seeing a tweet from someone who said they were at their very first opera with their auntie in county Sligo having an experience they could never have imagined, and I thought, ‘That’s how art gets through to people – you do something really, really well, and you do it without any pretence or dumbing down. You just bring them as close as possible to that experience they never imagined.'

And I never imagined that one day I would sit in a cinema and believe that I could truly be listening in the auditorium of the ROH – least of all when, as I was to learn in due course, the sound balancing technique was nothing remotely like the kind of ignorant fantasy I had imagined it might be.

'It’s a very delicate act,' says Allen. 'There are 14 microphones that hang from the roof for a fixed image of the theatre, but for the entire picture I am using multi-microphone techniques with some dozens of microphones, sometimes many dozens, to capture all the details, not only on the stage and in the pit but also through the auditorium, and you have to be extremely careful – a decibel too much here or there can immediately make the sound unnatural and artificial giving the game away.

'Add to this we have many radio microphones to give maximum clarity to the voices, but when singers move around there can be millimetres of seconds’ delay in their sound reaching our main vocal microphones at the front of the stage. This can cause coloration and balance problems, and so my highly skilled colleague Mark Thackeray, the ROH’s senior broadcast engineer, developed a technique to constantly chase those delays to close the distance acoustically.

'Alongside the ROH sound team there are also skilled radio mic operators with a wonderful bedside manner who attach them to the singers and their costumes. Altogether with these relays there’s a big risk element – don’t forget, they are live broadcasts, so there’s no facility for playing the recording back and making adjustments. I could play it safer but we need lots of detail to make the music alive in the cinema. Working on live broadcasts was a new thing for me and I initially thought this is heaven, there’ll be no singers asking me to make them louder like they do in the studio. But very early on, in the interval of a live relay, I heard the voice of Dmitri Hvorostosky speaking to me on the intercom, "My friends in Moscow tell me that I am too soft in the cinema, please make me louder!"'

Jonathan Allen has been one of the earliest masters of the Dolby Atmos immersive sound technique that gives enhanced 360 degrees atmospheric sound integration. He produced the very first opera in Dolby Atmos on Blu Ray, Pappano conducting Cavelleria Rusticana and Pagliacci – meaning the home consumer with a Dolby Atmos system can experience something even more immersive than the cinema audience can at the moment on a live broadcast.

'It’s a format that gives me much hope for the future of the music industry. Amazon, Apple and Netflix now all offer the consumer immersive playback at home on speakers, soundbars or headphones. People have always struggled setting up a pair of stereo speakers at home, but when I play good new mixes in Dolby Atmos people just smile and want to listen more. I think now that televisions are into a visual resolution of 8K there isn’t much further to go with vision, and the next big bang for your buck to expand the home entertainment experience will be sound, and it’s easier to setup than ever before.'