Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf

In August 2017, under the baton of Florian Helgath, the ChorWerk Ruhr presented the Officium Defunctorum by Thomás Luis de Victoria at the Zeche Zollern in Dortmund. Ian Weinfurtner, a student in the department Audio and Video, was the sound engineer.

The unusual venue presented a particular challenge for the recording: In the decommissioned mining plant, a machine hall serves as a concert hall. One half of the huge hall is used for stage and seating, while the other half is occupied by an exhibition of machines. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a cathedral built around the old machines.

Ian Weinfurtner succeeded in impressively capturing these acoustic conditions in the recording.

The production was a part of his final examination in the upper-level project Classical Music Recording supervised by Professor Dagmar Birwe at the Institute of Music and Media Düsseldorf, and won the Silver Award at the Student Recording Competition at the 144th AES Convention in Milan in 2018.