Allowing a conductor and his orchestra to play together in streaming, live, albeit from different locations: this is the ambitious goal achieved by the project "Orchestra diffusa" of the Foundation Ravenna Manifestazioni, in collaboration with Lepida, BH Audio & Ravenna Streaming, and realized through the staging, last September 30th, of the "Zanetto" by Mascagni at 7 contemporary recording sessions, located in Emilia-Romagna.

The project was born after the lockdown to allow simultaneous performances, even remotely; a possibility very difficult to apply so far, considering the latency of a few milliseconds and the high homogenization necessary to obtain a perfect synch. In order to achieve this goal, Lepida provided its regional fiber optic network infrastructure with high capacity and very low latency; the European companies Lawo and Remic offered respectively the reception/transmission equipment and the special microphones used, while BH set up the location of each session (Comacchio, Ravenna, Faenza, Cervia, Modena, Lugo and Russi). The technical characteristics required to transport these very high quality streams, about 700Mbps Multicast, are often reachable locally, i.e. within the theater or recording studio, and only thanks to the specific configurations of the Lepida Network (Multicast over MPLS, Intelligent Queuing Management and specific QoS), it was possible to extend the project to a regional dimension with locations 130Km apart.

The Arcangelo Corelli Orchestra participated in the innovative experiment, conducted by Maestro Jacopo Rivani and directed by Andrea Maria Mazza; the "Zanetto", a short opera of only 35 minutes, was chosen for its linear structure - a dialogue between one soprano and one alto - which made it easier to synchronize the sites, centrally directed in Comacchio. The performance of the opera was filmed live with the aim of making a docufilm, which will be broadcast on LepidaTV and on the Ravennafestival.live platform.