Last week testrecordings for MULTIPLE voice/vision were on the agenda. We had the concert hall of AMUZ – a deconsecrated church in Antwerp, with superb acoustics – for 3 days. Not so much when you consider that we would need 1 full day to set up, and 1 other day to get the concert hall back to its original state.

So we had just one day for the actual test recordings, which consisted of two parts:
– one movement from a string quintet of Boccherini
– one duet violoncello – basso continuo

We planned the testrecordings just before an actual concert series at AMUZ, so we had the musicians of Ensemble Explorations in Antwerp anyway, in the midst of their rehearsals for the Boccherini Quintet series the weekend of 19-21 februari.

One of the goals of the testrecordings was to assess the feasibility of recording a multi-layered musical texture with as much separation as possible between the different layers of vision and sound.

As it was not absolutely necessary, for the testrecordings ánd for the first design explorations, to work with Bach’s music, the compromise was to record a movement from a Boccherini Quintet, so that we would have the same number of musicians as Roel Dieltiens would like to have in the future recording of ‘Ein Musikalisches Opfer’.

For each instrumentalist there was a camera (iso-recording) with a fixed frame. And also the sound of each instrument had to be recorded as isolated as possible.

This had an impact on the chambermusic performance practice: we had to make the distance between the  musicians quite a bit bigger than they were used to. Hence the set up in a wider semi-circle.

The goal of the second part of the testrecording was to determine whether the use of a harpsichord in ‘Ein Musikalisches Opfer’ might demand a different approach for both sound and vision recording.