Wagner’s Ring Cycle

Visual designer Mikki Kunttu was part of the talented creative team delivering Götterdämmerung at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, Finland, this summer, the final work in their staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a story as legendary as it is epic in scale.

Mikki designed lighting, video and scenography, as well as programmed lighting and video for the production on a grandMA3 system. Control for all four Ring Cycle operas was MA, but for this final work, everything was in place for Mikki to go fully grandMA3!

This was partly facilitated by the Opera which made the grandMA2 to grandMA3 transition over the summer of 2023. The earlier Ring Cycle productions – Das Rheingold in 2019, followed, after pandemic-related interruptions, by Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) in 2022, then Siegfried in 2023 – were created using grandMA2 or a mix of grandMA2 and grandMA3 for previz and production. 

In the last year, Mikki has also started using the power and flexibility of grandMA3 on his various design projects. 

Götterdämmerung’s grandMA3 system was comprised of 2 x grandMA3 full-size, 1 grandMA3 light, one grandMA3 onPC command wing XT and 2 x grandMA3 processing units XL, 2 x grandMA3 2Port Nodes, 28 x grandMA3 4Port Nodes and 6 x grandMA3 8Port Nodes, all owned by the Opera House. 

Mikki also used the Opera’s in-house lighting rig, which for Götterdämmerung featured 237 moving lights from three different manufacturers – Martin, Vari*lite and Claypaky, together with fog and haze machines. These were all run through the grandMA3 full-size console. 

Additionally, 11 x Green Hippo media servers were also controlled by the grandMA3 light console, feeding content out to 6 projectors and several LED screens plus 50 x pixel strip fixtures.

This complete Ring Cycle project was almost 8 years in the making for Mikki, from his initial conversations in 2016 to the staging of Götterdämmerung. 

He was commissioned the design by The National Opera’s Artistic director Lilli Paasikivi, who had been very inspired by his earlier work for Sibelius’ Kullervo. 

The Ring’s creative team comprised Stage Director Anna Kelo, costume designer Erika Turunen and Mikki. Musical Conductors for the different parts of the Ring were Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki and Hannu Lintu. 

Designing the essential triumvirate of visual departments - lighting, video and set - is the way Mikki prefers to work, as he can harmonise between the different aspects whilst exploring the space, symbiotic relationships and integration between all relative to the narrative action. 

For Mikki, The Ring brought many challenges, and a major one was keeping the messages clear and bold for the audiences whilst reflecting the huge complexities of the work itself. 

“The larger it gets the more I tend to concentrate on the basics,” he noted. “Wagner has written a lot of visual guidelines into the libretto, and we had no reason to largely disagree with him!”

Mikki developed a concept, where the main set pieces stayed the same through the four productions, and the scenes and visual variants were inspired by and / or complemented the main elements and visual theme.

“Scene-specific ideas for sets, lighting and video elements are not really core thinking for this version of The Ring,” he explained. 

The main physical set pieces were five black towers that travelled through all the productions creating the desired environments and spaces. Each carried a large LED screen. “Effectively, a tower was a see-through set piece that could be revolved in any direction,” explained Mikki. 

When it came to the lighting control, having been an MA user for decades and made the move to grandMA3, he comments, “It’s a big step forward. There’s quite a learning curve of course, but it is absolutely worth it! There’s no going back now and there is nothing I miss from the old grandMA2.” 

As a designer who also programmes most of his own shows, both lighting and video, from previz to production, he has a distinctive perspective on how a console should work as a tool to further imagination and artistic expression. 

Small practicalities repeated hundreds of times daily make a big difference in time consumed when programming, so grandMA3 features like being able to program and customise encoder layouts are an aspect he loves and appreciates. 

He also thinks grandMA3 is brilliant for controlling video and media servers.

He highlights how programming for opera or theatre is radically different to concerts, music shows or TV productions, and sometimes in these worlds, grandMA3’s more powerful features – like Phasers – are rarely needed.

“Opera is more about fine adjustments and looking for the right nuances and detailing. Flexible and programmable views, great tracking sheets, macros, etc., are all vital, rather than some of the gimmickier operations,” he says smiling and meaning the reference in the best possible context.

Here, Mikki relies on the multi-application approach of grandMA3 to be a great tool not only in concert and touring scenarios, but also for theatre and opera programming.

Ring Cycle – in entirety involving 16-17 hours of music – is THE most ambitious and extensive work that an opera designer can create, so Mikki relished the opportunity to work with such a fantastic team and be involved in producing this critically acclaimed work of which they are all proud. 

The Opera House lighting crew included lighting managers Kimmo Ruskela and Tommi Härkönen, deputy lighting manager Gabriel Phillips-Sanchez, lighting operator Tommi Saviranta and video operators, Heikki Riihijärvi and Jani Virmavirta.

Photos: © Mikki Kunttu

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