Another recording supervision seminar, led by Sascha Etezazi, confronted the participating tonmeister students with an exceptionally demanding project. At the center was the musical recording supervision of an audio and video production featuring the Young German Philharmonic—a nationally renowned student orchestra with a long tradition and outstanding artistic quality.

The pro­duc­tion took place in the former power plant (E-Werk) in Schwer­in, a loc­a­tion that was both in­spir­ing and chal­len­ging from an acous­tic and tech­nic­al per­spect­ive. The ETI team was re­spons­ible for the com­plete mu­sic­al re­cord­ing su­per­vi­sion, trans­lat­ing the or­ches­tra’s artist­ic in­ten­tions in­to a co­her­ent and high-qual­ity au­dio-visu­al pro­duc­tion un­der these spe­cif­ic con­di­tions.

An ad­di­tion­al lay­er of com­plex­ity arose from the close col­lab­or­a­tion with the video and light­ing team of the pro­duc­tion com­pany Klang­malereiTV, who were re­spons­ible for the visu­al concept. Cam­era work, light­ing design, and edit­ing re­quire­ments had a sig­ni­fic­ant im­pact on mi­cro­phone place­ment, setup, and work­flow. Con­tinu­ous and pre­cise com­mu­nic­a­tion between au­dio, video, and light­ing de­part­ments was there­fore es­sen­tial and de­man­ded a high de­gree of flex­ib­il­ity from every­one in­volved.

Mu­sic­ally, the pro­ject fo­cused on the fourth move­ment of Dmitri Shos­takovich’s Sym­phony No. 11, per­formed by the Young Ger­man Phil­har­mon­ic un­der the dir­ec­tion of con­duct­or Stan­islaw Kochanowski. The work’s wide dy­nam­ic range, dense or­ches­tra­tion, and dra­mat­ic in­tens­ity placed high de­mands on re­cord­ing su­per­vi­sion, sound design, and tech­nic­al real­iz­a­tion.

Bey­ond the mu­sic­al re­spons­ib­il­ity, the ton­meister team faced nu­mer­ous ad­di­tion­al chal­lenges: work­ing with a large, pro­fes­sion­ally or­gan­ized or­ches­tra, ad­apt­ing to an un­fa­mil­i­ar spa­tial en­vir­on­ment, man­aging a com­plex tech­nic­al setup, and op­er­at­ing un­der the time con­straints of a me­dia pro­duc­tion. Many de­cisions had to be made quickly while main­tain­ing artist­ic and tech­nic­al pre­ci­sion.

It was pre­cisely this con­cen­tra­tion of artist­ic am­bi­tion, tech­nic­al com­plex­ity, and or­gan­iz­a­tion­al pres­sure that turned the sem­in­ar in­to an ex­tremely valu­able learn­ing ex­per­i­ence. The in­tens­ive work con­tin­ued in­to the post-pro­duc­tion phase, which was also an in­teg­ral part of the sem­in­ar. Here, the re­cor­ded ma­ter­i­al was re­viewed, re­fined, and shaped in­to a co­her­ent au­dio-visu­al res­ult.

The fi­nal out­come re­flects not only the high mu­sic­al level of the or­ches­tra but also the pro­fes­sion­al growth of the ton­meister team. The pro­duc­tion is visu­ally com­pel­ling and, above all, re­ward­ing to listen to, high­light­ing the edu­ca­tion­al value of real-world large-scale re­cord­ing pro­jects with­in re­cord­ing su­per­vi­sion train­ing.

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