The RCF Arena Campovolo, Reggio Emilia, Italy was inaugurated on Saturday, 4 June, with a Luciano Ligabue concert. A total of 103,000 spectators gathered in what is currently Europe’s largest permanent arena. It is laid out in the shape of a plectrum with a gradual 5% slope and ten fixed audio delay towers. The concert was originally scheduled for 2020 to celebrate the 30th year of the Reggio Emilian artist Ligabue’s career, but was postponed for two years running due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
The three-hour, highly intense show featured many distinguished guests, including Francesco De Gregori, Mauro Pagani, Loredana Bertè, Elisa and Eugenio Finardi. More than three hundred Claypaky fixtures were used – among others – to light the event, including an enormous number of B-EYE K20, Mythos 2, Sharpy and Alpha Beam 1500 units.
The lighting designer and visual content coordinator Jo Campana told us: ‘’When official permission to hold the concert arrived from the authorities, our well-established team, consisting of Luciano himself, his manager Maioli, the production director Comanducci and Jo Campana, quickly set about implementing the project. We agreed to work with a stage you could call a classic ‘black-box’: a very large box (just over 250 feet of stage front, about 72 feet high and over 52 feet deep) with a traditional truss design (four straight battens on the ceiling and four side battens) and a substantial number of lights fitted in thirty-two prewired cages arranged on the floor. This focused the attention on the elements that have always been the hallmark of a successful rock concert: loads of powerful lights together with a top-quality sound system.”
Jo Campana went on to say: “the Claypaky lights I asked for were instrumental in supporting and implementing the show’s strong scenic and visual impact. In detail, I used eighty-four B-EYE K20 units to provide strong key lighting over the entire walkable area of the stage, forty-two Mythos 2 units, whose versatility I exploited both in spot and beam modes, a hundred and eight Sharpy units to frame/mark out the space and highlight the most aggressive parts of the songs, and forty Alpha Beam 1500 units housed in clusters of four on each of the ten delay towers for constant arena audience lighting. I should also mention the three large 52.5×29.5-foot LED screens. The one in the middle was ‘see-through’, and was often ‘pierced’ by thirty Claypaky Sharpy units placed behind it. They interacted with the video material, which was created specifically for each of the thirty-two songs on the setlist.
Jo Campana was very satisfied with the performance of the lights he used: “I have used them plenty of other times in the past, and I chose them again on this momentous occasion precisely because of their well-known efficiency and reliability.”
Agora was the event lighting service company. Stefano Sebastianelli was assistant lighting designer and programmer and Daniele Francescone, lighting crew chief.
Upcoming dates: Ligabue will be at the Verona Arena, Italy for seven concerts from 27 September to 6 October, and then four dates in the rest of Europe from 26 October to 31 October.