Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus, one of the famous sites of the annual Salzburg Festival, is situated in the historic city center, and partially built into the Mönchsberg, a hill adjacent to the river Salzach. Originally, the building belonged to the court stables, which also include the equally renowned Felsenreitschule.
The idea for the new opera and concert hall was realized from 1956 to 1960 according to plans by the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister. 55,000 cubic meters of rock were blasted out of the Mönchsberg to make room for the building. Its grand opening took place on July 26, 1960 with a performance of Richard Strauss’ Rosenkavalier under Herbert von Karajan. Its design and technical facilities still meet international expectations after more than 50 years of service.
The layout of the auditorium is almost square, and provides ideal acoustical and optical conditions for 2,158 spectators on the main floor and balcony. The iron curtain – just so you know – weighs 34 tons and is one meter thick in the middle. Quite obviously, the Festspielhaus is the place for big productions, as the stage behind that curtain alone measures 100 by 25 meters, so that there is little danger of running out of space.
A part of the former stables, the Winter Riding School, was converted into a break area for the festival guests and a smaller concert hall, and named Karl-Böhm-Saal after the conductor’s death in 1981. The site with its baroque stone balustrade, large ceiling fresco and oaken parquet flooring offers enough room for classical opera, and has its own character and acoustical footprint.
One secret of this great sounding room is rooted in the fact that the reflecting surfaces near the stage are arranged in a funnel-like fashion, which results in an optimized acoustic “coupling” of the stage house to the hall and gives the architecture of the room a partly square and partly fan-shaped design, slightly reminiscent of an ancient Greek theater. The room boasts fantastic acoustic properties, based on the excellent design by acousticians Schwaiger and Keilholz as well as crucial input by Herbert von Karajan. Orchestras plaing in the hall sound elegant, wide and warm, engulfing the listener in a very natural and balanced way, with instruments still clearly locatable.
Vienna MIR Pro 3D recreates this hall using an unprecedented amount of 6,400 impulse responses. They were captured with four Ambisonics microphones, alternatively placed in a height of approximately 2 and 4 meters above the ground for a true 3D rendition with spaced layers, and can be used in pairs: front and front elevated, back and back elevated. In addition to the large stage, virtual instruments or any audio signal can be placed on the wings of the stage and even behind the wooden lamellas on each side (represented by the two hotspots left and right of the stage) for creating distant voices.
The average reverb time is about 1.6 seconds. You may easily shape the length of the reverb tail with the Reverb Time Scaling feature of MIR Pro 3D / 24.
The nearby Karl Böhm Hall serves not only as a foyer but also hosts all sorts of prestigious events. The hall is 47 m long and 13 m wide (154 x 43 ft.), and the combination of stone, wood and the 600 square meter ceiling fresco creates a very unique and beautiful acoustic signature.
It was built in 1662 by Prince-Archbishop Guidobald Graf von Thun as a winter riding school, and converted in 1926 by the Salzburg architect Clemens Holzmeister. During the building work the rock face of the Mönchsberg was revealed at the southern end of the hall. The walls of the Karl Böhm Hall are paneled with dark wood, with several balconies breaking up the coffered structure. In connection with the major conversion of the adjacent Felsenreitschule in 1969/70, Clemens Holzmeister linked the dais (i.e., the podium above the entrance) with two wooden staircases in the style of the rest of the hall.
We like to refer to this magnificent hall as the world’s largest reverb chamber in 3D. As in the Grosses Festspielhaus, two Ambisonics microphones were placed at a height of 2 meters, with two more placed 4 meters above the ground, for an additional “spaced” 3D depiction of any audio signal you’re sending into this marvelous room. This is your perfect choice for big sounding reverbs, fanfare applications or any signal you want to place in a dense but very natural and lively ambience. Conveniently, instruments can be placed on either side of the hall, as well as on each of the two balconies. With its very distinctive acoustic signatures on both the “stone end” and the “wooden end”, this hall is a veritable treasure trove in the quest for truly “great” reverb.
The average reverb time is about 2.6 seconds. You may easily shape the length of the reverb tail with the Reverb Time Scaling feature of MIR Pro 3D / 24.
The team members of the Vienna Symphonic Library are known for their great team spirit, out-of-the-box thinking and their Austrian "Schmäh" (a specific sense of humour). Here are the guys responsible for the recordings of the Grosses Festspielhaus and Karl Boehm Hall.
MIR Recording Team (left to right): Johannes Rettensteiner (whose idea it was to record a MIR Venue in Salzburg Festspielhaus), Dietz Tinhof (VSL), Edwin Pfanzagl-Cardone (Head of Sound, Salzburger Festspiele), Markus Wallner (VSL), Moritz Grusch, Ben-Daniel Keller (who had to leave early and so escaped being depicted).
MIR Recording Team (left to right): Dietmar “Dietz” Tinhof (VSL), Johannes Rettensteiner, Moritz Grusch, Markus Wallner (VSL)
This RoomPack contains room responses with augmented directional resolution, improving their spatial mapping in direction and depth. Our first-order measurements were augmented to third-order Ambisonics by Franz Zotter, Matthias Frank and Elias Hoffbauer (University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics) in 2022.
Photos © VSL unless otherwise noted.