Opinions

Erdo Groot, balance engineer, Polyhymnia International B.V. about the Manezh hall of the theatre “School of Dramatic Art”:

«The School of Dramatic Art was the venue of our latest recording project with Essential Music. We recorded the Hermitage Chamber Orchestra with Alexei Utkin in a program of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach. Also we recorded a disc of Harpsichord music with Olga Martynova. The theatre has a kind of shoebox shape (a shape that is a very good starting point for a music acoustic) with an open floor plan and adjacent side boxes for the audience.
Special care has been taken in the design to create an acoustic that makes it possible to understand speakers throughout the hall. Unlike many theatres for speech where understanding is made possible by damping the reflections and reverb it has been achieved here by a resonating acoustic resulting in volume as well as quality. For music the result was fantastic. Over the spectrum all the instruments had a resonance in the acoustic with a mixing of sonorities that kept it's quality over a wide distance. This made it possible for us to use our purist recording approach and resulted in spacious orchestral sound with musical clarity, with special quality of the bass section of the orchestra. The same kind of quality was apparent with the instrumental sound of the harpsichord, clarity with acoustic coupling and wonderful reflections and reverb helping the resonating sounds of all the registers.
I am looking forward to future possibilities to record different ensembles and instruments, knowing that with up to chamber opera all kinds will produce great results in this venue. .»
 

Dierd Swaida, Manager of the National Theatre in Budapest:

«The acoustical design (special hologram acoustical treatment) fulfilled by a Russian Academician, A.K.Popov in the  new National Theatre  of Hungary considerably improved the acoustical parameters of the stage space and auditorium. The unique method allowed to get rid of acoustical problems (time of  reverberation, diffraction etc.) that were the consequence of the architectural design, to improve considerably stage speech and music sounding without interfering into the original architectural design. The work fulfilled by A.K.Popov at the construction of the new National Hungarian Theatre is an exceptionally precious contribution.»
 

Mikhail Serebryaniy, musical and sound producer,  «Essential Music» Company  about the Manezh hall of the theatre “School of Dramatic Art”:

«The general impression of the Manezh hall’s acoustics is extremely favorable. The sound is surprisingly volumetric, ovoid and columnar, amplificating. With such general characteristics of acoustics, it would be quite reasonable to await an effect of  a droning  blurred bass. However in reality all the bass register wonderfully gets sorted out  not only by groups, but also by single instruments. Such «upright» acoustics makes quite strict demands of performers, bringing to light, in a pitiless way, all the misfits of the middle and lower parts of the orchestra. In this hall one can record both solo and chamber and orchestra music  (with an orchestra comprising up to  20 persons), setting the most uncompromising aims. By minimum means one can achieve polar acoustical effects, either strengthening, for instance,  «cathedral» character of sounding  or “drying up” the sound pattern.

Yuri Shikhov, Sound Equipment and Installations Department of «MediaMatrix-Centre» about the theatre «School of Dramatic Art»:

«This is really a unique theatre not only in Russia, but in Europe. /…/  … A prominent Russian Academician, Arkady K.Popov and the sound engineer and acoustician of the theatre, Andrew Zachesov, together  designed the natural (architectural) acoustics of all the halls during the construction of the theatre. Special hologram acoustical treatment of the halls was fulfilled based on a specially developed technology. It is an astonishing world of unique natural acoustics: somewhere thick and saturate, somewhere transparent and enriched by harmonics of early reverberations, somewhere slight with a long softly dying away “hall”. /…/ It is very precise and strictly defined architectural acoustics of the Manezh hall, where the harmonics of early reverberations of a sound signal create favorable and comfortable sounding of acoustics.»
 

«Tchasnik» newspaper about the Classics Hall  in Ivanovo

«The opening of the chamber hall “Classics" became an important event for the cultural life of the town. This hall has got no analogues either in Ivanovo, or in Russia. They tried to create it according to all the laws of such type of facilities. /.../ At the phase of design and construction of the facility, special attention was paid to acoustics. The hall was, in a special way, acoustically designed and treated. One dare say that, at the present moment, it is the best concert hall in the whole Ivanovo region.»